
Class 
Book. 






SMITHSONIAN DEPOSIT 



THE 



PRINCIPLE OF SYNTHETIC UNITY 
IN BERKELEY AND KANT. 



By 
SAMUEL mI^DICK, A.M., Ph.D. 



^Z<^ 



LOWELL, MASS.: 
Morning Mail Company Print. 



CV) 



J-f 



Jilt'- 






PREFACE. 



This little volume was prepared as a thesis for the degree 
of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Michigan. By 
the advice of Dr. John Dewey I have undertaken to interpret 
the Metaphysical Notes of Berkeley's Commonplace Book, 
and as far as possible discover the Principle of Unity which 
occasionally manifests itself in Berkeley's works and which 
formed a basis for a " Treatise on the Will" which Berkeley 
contemplated but never produced. 

I wish to express my indebtedness to Dr. Dewey for his 
assistance in the selection of collateral reading and for his 
suggestions in the development of the thesis. No literature 
could be secured bearing upon the interpretation of the Notes, 
hence the Notes have been classified and such as bear upon 
the theme under discussion have been used. Often the 
phraseology has been preserved but where that could not be 
done the thought has been expressed in phraseology as nearly 
Berkeleian as the author could select so as to preserve the 
unity that runs through the Notes. 

This principle of unity found in Berkely has been compared 
and contrasted with the Unity of Kant. 

s. M. D. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

Introduction i 

I. 

The Will as Seen in Berkeley's Commonplace Book. 

I. The Commonplace Book. 3 

a. Source of authority 3 

b. Basis for a broader philosophy 4 

c. The period in which Berkeley lived .5 

i'. The new question. ....... 6 

d. Berkeley's hope in establishing the principle. ... 6 

i'. Berkeley not satisfied with his philosophy. . . 7 
2 The Will Defined. 

a. The abstract of the Will 7 

b. The concrete of the Will. 8 

c. The Will a pure activity 9 

i'. Berkeley's approach to the modern idea. . . 9 

d. The difficulties in treating the Will 10 

3. The Will and the Understanding 11 

4. What Wills and how? 11 

5. Connection with the Divine Will 12 

II. 
Will, a Synthetic Element or Activity. 

I. The Process of Knowledge. 

a. What Berkeley attempts 14 

b. The source of knowledge 16 

i'. Sensations. 16 

2'. Thoughts 17 

c. Objects of conscious experience 18 

i'. First element 18 

2 Second element. 18 



VI 



3'. Elements discussed 

a\ Perception. 

i". Kant's schematism foreshadowed. 
2". Imagination not a synthetic element 
3". Substantiality in the Material World 
4". Permanence necessary to perception. 

F. Conception 

i". Berkeley's dualism. 
The "Will's function in knowledge. 
a. Berkeley influenced by Descartes. 

d. Will — The source of the modes of knowledge 
c. How Will becomes a synthetic activity. 
<i. Will in a disjunctive judgment. . 

e. Will the underlying unity. . . . . 
/. Berkeley compared with Bowne. . 

Bodies exist without the mind 

a. No experience without existing bodies. 
/>. Existence of bodies not a fancy. 

c. Three theories for the existence of the Universe, 

l'. Abstractly objective 

2'. Abstractly subjective. 

3'. Dynamic inter-relation. 

4'. To which does Berkeley belong ? 

d. Berkeley's later philosophy. 
Knowledge and Reason. 

a. Transition to Reason. ..... 

b. Reason — "Nature immersed in matter." 

c. Morris on Berkeley. ..... 

d. Berkeley's Reason like that of Kant. . 

III. 

Kant's Transcendental Ego. 



Pag-e 
21 



23 

25 

25 

27 
28 
30 
30 

31 
32 
33 
35 
35 
35 
37 
38 
38 
38 
39 
39 
40 

42 

45 
45 
46 



I. The Transcendental Ego defined 47 

a. Not a concept. , . 47 

b. Terms applied to it 47 

c. The starting place of metaphysics 48 



vn 

Page 

d. Descartes' cogtto ergo sum. . . . . . . 49 

e. Kant's criticism 51 

/. The Transcendental and the Empirical Ego. ... 52 

g. The relation of the Transcendental Ego to the Noumenon. 53 

2. The function of the Transcendental Self in knowledge. . . 56 

a. Robert Adamson's conament. 56 

d. Concreteness implied in Kant's analytic thought . . 57 

c. The Ego not a power of theoretical cognition. ... 58 

d. Necessity founded on transcendental conditions. . . 59 
£. Thought and the manifold united 60 

3. Summary. 

a. Sources of confusion 62 

l>. Categories as tools. . 63 

c. Something given to thought. 64 

J. Kant's treatment of thought and the manifold. . . 65 

IV. 

Points of Resemblance and Difference Compared 
AND Contrasted. 

1. Defects Considered. 

a. Berkeley entitled to more credit than received. . . 67 

d. Chief point of failure. 67 

c. Berkeley failed to use the dialectic 68 

d. Kant's advance on Berkeley. 69 

e. Defects in Kant's system 70 

2. Similarities pointed out 71 

a. Specific likenesses. ........ 72 

6. Synthetic activity in experience ...... 74 

c. Difference that of induction and deduction. • • • 75 

3. Differences pointed out. 77 

a. Their dualism 78 

l>. Summary. 79 

4. Conclusion. 79 

Bibliography. 81 



THE PRINCIPLE OF SYNTHETIC UNITY 
IN BERKELEY AND KANT. 



Every student of modern philosophy gives to Kant 
the credit of formulating and developing a synthetic 
principle in knowledge, which prior to Kant had re- 
ceived little or no attention. There is no doubt the 
credit is properly placed ; the very nature of philosophy 
is to have a system ; philosophy is a system ; but before 
there is a development there must be a movement of 
thought through various stages. These stages, accor- 
ding to advanced modern logic, are three in number 
and are represented by three forms of judgment, viz., 
the categorical, the hypothetical and the disjunctive. 
The first of these judgments is the statement of a fact ; 
the second, the statement of a fact under certain limi- 
tations and conditions ; the third, the statement of a 
fact with all the conditions overcome and realized. 
It may be said that through the movement of thought 
in modern philosophy, Berkeley's forecast of the Will 
is the categorical judgment concerning the synthetic 
principle or activity in knowledge, that Kant's Critique 
of Pure Reason is the h^^pothetical judgment, and 
Hegel's Philosophy is the disjunctive judgment. 



The work of this paper is to discover, if possible, 
whether such a relation exists, i. e., to compare, as 
synthetic activities in knowledge, the active principle 
of Will as seen in Berkeley's Commonplace Book with 
the Transcendental Ego of Kant's Critique of Pure 
Reason. The author will, therefore, in the develop- 
ment of Berkeley's principle of Will, reserve the right 
to use Kantian phraseology where it seems best and 
where it precisely expresses the Berkelean thought. 

The subject will be treated under the following heads ; 

I. The Will as seen in Berkeley's Commonplace 
Book. 

II. The Will a Synthetic Activity in Knowledge. 

III. Kant's use of the Transcendental Unity of Apper- 

ception. 

IV. Points of Resemblance and Difference Compared 

and Contrasted. 



I. 



THE WILL AS SEEN IN BERKELEY S COMMONPLACE 

BOOK. 

In developing the philosophy of the Commonplace 
Book, a brief reference to the sources of material will 
be necessary to show the character of the philosophical 
study of Berkeley in preparing for the production of the 
works he has left to us. The Commonplace Book was 
published for the first time in 187 1, edited by Alexander 
Campbell Fraser, of the University of Edinburgh. It 
consists of an unclassified collection of metaphysical 
thoughts expressed almost entirely in single sentences, 
which represent the suggestions of the author's mind as 
he read many philosophical works and pondered over 
the subjects he contemplated developing. Some of 
these subjects he did develop, while others lie hidden in 
the thoughts of the Commonplace Book. It is the ob- 
ject of this investigation to trace out some of those 
hidden lines of thought, and, if possible, to discover 
Berkeley's theory of the human will and the part it 
plays, as a unifying activity, in a system of knowledge. 

The references named in the Commonplace Book are 
so numerous and comprehensive that it relieves the stu- 
dent of much laborious effort to find the sources of study 
which enabled Berkeley to form his conceptions. He 



makes frequent reference to the leading mathematicians 
of the day, and his frequent and specific references to 
Locke show him to have been thoroughly master of 
Locke's philosophical position on every phase of the 
Human Understanding. He also makes many and 
familiar references to Descartes, Malebranche, Hobbes, 
Spinoza, Newton, and others. He was also familiar 
with Aristotle and Plato. 

A basis is laid in the Commonplace Book for a 
broader foundation of philosophical research and devel- 
opment than is found in the Principles. The mere 
matter of solving the problem which arose from the 
misconception of the material universe was not all that 
Berkeley meant to do. He anticipated the period of 
critical philosophy which was to follow and proposed to 
lay a metaphysical basis for the purpose of robbing his 
critics of all opportunity of taking a deep hold on him. 
He meant to leave no weak place of attack from which 
his critics might succeed in dethroning him or in driving 
him from the position which he so manfully maintained. 
In order to accomplish this, he deemed "A Treatise on 
the Human Will" necessary and proceeded to lay the 
foundation for the same. This treatise of the will 
would have proved too narrow for his ontological inves- 
tigation ; so he proposed to look into the mind and its 
faculties in a broader sense, and has laid the fundamen- 
tal principles for this broader metaphysical development 
in the Commonplace Book. It is my purpose in this 
discussion to show what was Berkeley's conception of 



the Will as proposed in the contemplated treatise and to 
show, as far as possible, how he meant to apply the 
will in his ultimate theory of knowledge. To reach the 
conclusion desired in the premises laid down, a sum- 
ming up of the philosophical tendencies of Berkeley's 
time will be necessary to the introduction of this dis- 
cussion. 

Berkeley lived in a period when philosophers were 
analyzing Matter from every possible point of view, 
and with varied success were attempting to explain its 
existence. The "Abstractly Objective Theory" was 
prevalent. A "thing" must exist into which, as it were, 
the qualities, primary and secondary, were stuck ; but 
when these qualities were pulled out of the "thing" 
nothing was left, at least nothing that was knowable. 
This gave rise to material scepticism, and Berkeley 
realized that this scepticism of matter was leading to 
scepticism of reality of every sort. The failure of 
Locke, Malebranche, Descartes, and others to explain 
and define matter gave rise to the idea that matter might 
be even a cause* of consciousness ; and one philoso- 
pher^ went so far as to explain the existence of the 
mind by the body, or to show that the body was a suffi- 
cient cause for the explanation of the existence of the 
mind. Other philosophers^ advocated theories not less 
objectionable to Berkeley. These theories must be re- 
futed and something more rational and more satisfactory 
substituted for them. The mere overthrowing of a 

^ Locke. " Hobbes. » Spinoza and Leibnitz. 



6 



theory without substituting something more rational for 
it, does not lessen the tendencies to scepticism ; it only 
makes them greater. Foreseeing this, Berkeley aimed 
to introduce a new theory and then to defend his theory 
against all assaults from either contemporaries or suc- 
cessors. The first thing was to get the new question of 
the reality of matter before the minds of philosophers ; 
to this end he struggled long and hard, and we may say 
during his life, almost in vain. It was with this lever 
that Berkeley moved modern thought. He changed 
the whole channel of inquiry about matter, as well as 
the current of thought concerning it. How was this 
change made and by what argument was the theory 
sustained? The theory was that matter was a result of 
mental operations ; that matter only existed in the 
mind, or rather that matter could not exist without the 
mind. 

Could Berkeley but establish this important doctrine 
and at the same time prove the existence of spiritual 
substance, and thus with an unassumed premise explain 
cause and effect, the mists of scepticism would vanish. 
There would no longer be left any room for doubt; 
there would no longer be any philosophical problem 
for the materialists and idealists to quibble over. The 
conclusion would be final. To this end Berkeley pro- 
duced his "Principles of Human Knowledge." Nearly 
all the fundamental thoughts of the Principles are found 
in the Commonplace Book, but no argument. By 
tracing the argument through the Principles and com- 



paring it with the philosophical reasonings of the Siris, 
we notice a marked change in the psychology.^ There 
are indications also that Berkeley was not thoroughly 
satisfied with the metaphysical aspect of his Principles. 
This may be the key to the explanation why he never 
developed the metaphysical principles laid down in his 
Commonplace Book. Indeed, I think we shall discover 
before we have finished that there were certain points 
concerning the will and other faculties of the mind that 
he could not define to his own satisfaction and at the 
same time defend the doctrines set forth in his philosophy 
as handed down to us. 

Could Berkeley have carried his point there would 
have been nothing left for him to do but to establish the 
doctrines of the divinity as he understood them and thus 
have utterly demolished the "minute philosophers." 

Having said so much by way of explanation, let us ex- 
amine Berkeley's position with respect to the human will. 

Berkeley's new idea of matter made it necessary for 
him to put a new interpretation upon the functions of 
the will. The soul, properly speaking, is the will, and 
as such is distinct from idea ; that is, it cannot be classed 
with phenomena, and hence remains a mere abstrac- 
tion, and as an abstraction is absolutely unknowable; 
not unknowable in the sense that it is an unthinkable 
"thing" or essence, but unknowable in the sense that 
there can be no idea formed of it, it would at once 
become an idea itself which from the very nature of 

* Siris Sec. 303. 



8 

spirit or, of spirit-substance is absurd and a contradiction 
of terms. We are imposed upon by the words will, 
determine, agent, free, can, etc. To Berkeley words 
meant something, and the meaningless use to which 
many philosophers have put the above words has led us 
into many errors ; will is not an idea and indeed can- 
not be, and when it is made synonymous with words 
which do represent ideas, it leads us into conflicting 
judgments and inflicts upon us impositions which are in 
no way excusable. 

Let us, therefore, emphasize the fact that this un- 
known substratum, this abstract something, which un- 
derlies all volition and all ideas, is something whereof 
we know not, neither indeed is there any other being 
which has or can have an idea of it, for just as soon as 
it becomes reducible to the mere possibility of being 
known in the sense of an idea it ceases to be a will at 
all and we contradict ourselves by calling it so. Berke- 
ley, therefore, emphasizes the fact that "The Spirit — 
the active thing — that which is Soul and God — is the 
Will alone. The ideas are effects — impotent things." 

The concrete of the will and the understanding taken 
together may be called the mind, not the person. The 
definition of person is entirely omitted, but the idea 
implied that should we make the concrete of the will 
and understanding equal to person we introduce a 
second volitionating being or power into the world ; but 
this is contradictory to the acknowledged conception of 
but one volitionating being, viz. God. 



The will, says Berkeley, is '■'■ftirus actus, or rather 
pure spirit, not imaginable, not sensible, not intelligi- 
ble, in nowise the object of the understanding, and 
in nowise perceivable ;" its properties are immortality and 
incorruptibility, and its substance is to act, to cause, 
to will, to operate. Its substance is not knowable. 
It is seen from what precedes that it is soul, is God, 
and yet dependent upon God, i. e., that God is the 
only being in whom is vested the power of originat- 
ing volitions, but that there is a synthetic unity of 
the human and divine wills which renders them ab- 
solutely inseparable. The moment the human will 
becomes a unity in itself and entirely disconnected from , 
the divine will, it becomes a thing of which an idea 
can be formed and therefore an idea, and thus ceases 
to be a will at all ; yet as it is, it is a will, in as 
much as it has the power of placing if not of abso- 
lutely originating volitions. 

Berkeley was not satisfied with the scholastique 
term, "pure act" for the will, but substituted pure 
spirit, or active being from which I interpret him as 
approaching nearer to the Leibnitzian idea that will 
is not mere activity in general but that it is activity 
toward some definite end.^ He again approaches the 
idea of modern philosophy in his attempt to give the 
concrete of the will. In his reasoning he approaches 
that point where his conclusions would lead him to 
say that the will psychologically speaking is the per- 

* Leibnitz's Essay on Human Understanding. By John Dewey. 



lO 

son; this was Berkeley's thought yet he did not say 
it, for the simple reason that he was not absolutely 
sure of his premises, and he was careful to guard 
his statements lest a Hume should come after him. 
More recent philosophers have said it. "The will is 
the man, psychologically speaking."^ It is interest- 
ing, however, to see how nearly Berkeley approached 
this idea and then shrank from expressing himself 
lest he could not defend his doctrine. 

The difficulties in treating the will are not a few 
says Berkeley, and the great causes of perplexity and 
darkness arise from the fact that we imagine the 
will to be an object of thought ; we think we may 
perceive it, contemplate it, turn it this way and that, 
view it, and examine it as we would any object or 
any of our ideas, whereas in truth it is no idea, 
neither is there nor can there be any idea of it. If 
you say the will, or rather the volition, is a "thing," 
there is an ambiguity arises in the use of the word 
"thing" as applied to will and to idea. We may 
conclude therefore that the will is an active force, 
spiritual, forming in some way a union with the 
divine will, so that the volitionating of the divine will 
is so imparted to the human will that we may be 
said ourselves to volitionate. That the will is not 
■purus actus in the abstract sense, but that it is spirit 
acting with some end in view, the realization of 
which would have been an absolute self-consciousness, 

^ Psychology, By John Dewey, P. 417. 



II 



or such a consciousness of the ego within us, that 
from that consciousness we should be able to estab- 
lish beyond all doubt the existence of spirit substance. 

The Understanding and the Will : — The understand- 
ing taken as a faculty says Berkeley, is not really 
distinct from the will ; however, the will and the 
understanding may very well be thought to be two 
distinct activities. There is but little doubt that the 
separation of will and understanding vv^as a matter of 
which Berkeley was not sure, neither indeed was he 
able to form a unity of the two which made no dis- 
tinction between them. Every student of Berkeley is 
thoroughly acquainted with his conception of the word 
idea ; the difference between idea and volition is appar- 
ent ; the difference between will and understanding is 
relatively the difference between volition and idea, i. e., 
what the will is to volition, the understanding is to idea, 
or on the other hand, as volition is the realization of 
will so idea is the realization of understanding ; it 
follows, therefore, that will and understanding are in- 
separable, both abstract ideas, the existence of one 
necessitating the existence of the other, and that will is 
the cause of idea, and idea the realization of under- 
standing. 

What Wills and How? 

If you ask what thing it is that wills I must inquire 
what you mean by "thing," if you mean idea or any- 
thing like an idea, then I answer it is no "thing" at all 
that wills ; however extravagant this may seem never- 



12 



theless it is true, and it is that fundamental truth on 
which the foregoing argument is based. Willing is co- 
existent with self-consciousness and we can no more 
keep from willing than we can keep from existing ; 
while we exist we must therefore will ; the acquiescing 
in the present state is a process of willing. That which 
wills is an active power, spirit, and there is no other 
active power that can possibly be conceived of but the 
will. Here the conclusion to which Berkeley is tend- 
ing is already manifesting itself; he says there is no 
active power but the will, therefore if matter exists at 
all it does not affect us ; whether or not Berkelej^ is able, 
metaphysically, to prove the doctrine of his Principles, 
he proposes to show that it forms no basis whatever 
for the prevalent scepticism with respect to those reali- 
ties which are of prime importance in attaining the 
highest end of man's existence. 

(i) The connection of the human with the divine will. 

To show this connection is to answer the question 
how the will wills, and it is this connection which de- 
termines the difference between cause and occasion. 
Occasion arises from a power that is without us, and 
is acting independent of us ; and of those things which 
happen from without, we are not the cause, but there is 
another cause for them i. e., there is a being which 
wills these perceptions in us. Therefore, there is a 
duality existing, a human and a divine will, and the 
human is not reducible to a mere machine to serve the 
purpose of the divine. 



13 

The properties of all things are in God, i. e., there is 
in the Deity understanding as well as will. He is no 
blind agent ; in truth a blind agent is a contradiction. 
In this lies the substance of Berkeley's philosophy, 
whatever may be ascribed to the faculties of man be- 
long to the faculties of God or to the attributes of God ; 
on the other hand, and set over against this is man as a 
volitionating being ; separate man from the Deity and 
he becomes a blind agent ; make him a machine 
through which the Deity operates and he ceases to be 
an agent at all. The conclusion is then that the human 
will is an activity within itself capable of volitionating 
and yet dependent upon and inseparable from the 
Divine will. They are two things uniting and adher- 
ing, as it were, in one substratum, viz., spirit substance, 
(pure reality) which is thinkable but not reducible to 
an idea. 



II. 

WILL, A SYNTHETIC ELEMENT OR ACTIVITY. 

Our investigation thus far has been to detect, if 
possible, Berkeley's conception of the Will, but he goes 
further than the mere attempt to gain a notion of what 
the will is, he plans to bring the will into his philosophy 
in the ultimate answer to his questions what are ex- 
istence, reality, externality, causality and reason. As 
Kant's philosophy is an attempt to answer the ques- 
tions, how are mathematics, physics and metaphysics 
possible? and in his answers to establish a system of 
metaphysics, so Berkeley's proposed philosophy was an 
attempt not only to define the meaning of the words 
existence, reality, externality, causality and reason but 
to show that these things were possible and what was 
the essence of them. Could Berkeley succeed in this 
then he could or would have solved the whole philoso- 
phic problem ; there would no longer be any excuse for 
scepticism or dogmatism. To this end he produced his 
philosophical works which form the nucleus out of 
which has grown the most of our modern philosophic 
thought. The unity, however, which is necessary to a 
complete knowledge of the physical and spiritual worlds 
he never realized ; the science of metaphysics he never 
formulated. Of this fact Berkeley was fully conscious, 



15 

but was no more satisfied to leave the problem there 
than modern philosophers have been to accept his doc- 
trines as conclusive. It was for the completion of a 
science of metaphysics, to reach a unity in knowledge, 
that Berkeley proposed to produce a treatise on the 
will,' and the second part of this paper is to show that 
Berkeley meant to make the will fundamental in know- 
ledge and metaphysics. 

A complete answer to the above questions was to 
Berkeley a complete unity in knowledge of all things 
both physical and metaphysical. 

To reach Berkeley's contemplated conclusion it will 
be necessary to examine the part played by experience 
in this perfect knowledge, or to find out if possible what 
experience really is. 

All our knowledge, says Berkeley, is about ideas ; he 
here uses the word ideas^ as closely allied to, if not a 
synonym for experience. He says "our simple ideas 
are so many simple thoughts or perceptions."^ All 
ideas are either from without or from within. If from 
without, they are sense ideas or sensations ; if from 
within, they are operations of the mind, products of 
thought. Kant would call them categories. Know- 
ledge is about ideas but knowledge is not ideas ; know- 
ledge is experience and has in it two factors, perception 
and thought. So called ideas are not ideas unless they 
can be reduced to things perceivable, and not mere 

» Berkeley's Works Vol. i, P. \%\. 

* The Commonplace Book (found in the Liie and Letters of George Berkeley 
with Writings Hitherto Unpublished) P. 489. 



i6 

activities ; neither can there be ideas without perception 
actual or presupposed;^ neither can a perception be 
perceived without a thing (an activity) to perceive 
it. 2 It follows that knowledge about ideas when taken 
from these two sources within and without, reduces 
practically to experience ; at least knowledge cannot be 
without the two factors perception and thought. 

There is no knowledge except from these sources, i. 
e., except it be made up of the two elements perception 
and thought. This is clear for Berkeley says, if it were 
not for the senses, that the mind could have no know- 
ledge ; no thought at all.^ And the whole tenor of his 
philosophy is to show that sensations alone are not 
knowledge, but only things about which we have 
knowledge. The two factors which enter into our 
knowledge make it possible for us to have an experience 
without which we could not have knowledge at all. 

Neither sensations nor thought alone can give us ex- 
perience,* for if we attempt to set off the operations of 
the mind to themselves and set them over against the 
conditions of perception and, excluding the latter, 
attempt to draw experience out of the former, we can 
succeed only by reducing the fundamental activities or 
modes of the understanding to ideas, but the moment 
they become ideas, they cease to be activities ; they are 
mere "things" and we are found in a hopeless contra- 

^ The Cornmonplace Book, PP. 423 and 433. 
'^ " " " " 498 " 438. 

» " « " P. 434. 

* Introduction to Selections, P. XXVII. 



17 

diction of terms. If we keep, within the operations of 
the mind's activity, in our search for the possibility of 
experience, we can have no ideas of this activity and 
hence experience is impossible. On the other hand, if 
we attempt to draw experience out of sensations alone 
we rob ourselves of the power of self-identity. ^ The 
essence of mind, the ego which is substantial would at 
once be excluded. Sense-ideas or phenomena are at 
once dependent upon the mind and symbolical of the 
intuitions of the mind.^ To draw experience from sen- 
sations alone excludes this mind essence and leaves 
experience to the work of a blind agent which is no 
less contradictory than our former proposition of draw- 
ing experience out of our mental operations. There 
are then in all knowledge two elements and these are 
the same as Kant calls a priori and a posteriori. 

Men are confused in their attempts to solve the 
problem of knowledge, because they look to other 
sources than the understanding for knowledge, and 
there is no knowledge without the understanding. ^ Still 
another source of confusion arises out of the fact that 
words which signify the operations of the mind are 
taken from sensible ideas. The remedy for this is in 
studying the understanding* and in finding out its rela- 
tions to the problem of knowledge. 

We must pause for a moment to inquire, what are ob- 

» Berkeley's Works, Vol. i, PP. 32S-329. 

2 " " " I, P. 230 and The Principles, Sec. 142. 

'Commonplace Book, P. 432. 
'• P. 435- 



jects of knowledge and how do they exist? The objects 
of conscious experience are alleged, in section one 
of the "Principles of Human Knowledge," to be "(a') 
sense-given or external phenomena, (b') internal phe- 
nomena, (c) phenomena which may be representative 
or misrepresentative of both these. "^ These sense-given 
or external phenomena which are necessary to a con- 
scious experience are objects existing just as really as 
any object exists to the most radical advocate of the 
school of realism ; for without their actual existence 
neither experience nor knowledge could be possible. 
"Sensible things, — trees, houses, mountains, the whole 
choir of heaven and the furniture of earth — to the indi- 
vidual percipient — consist at once of actually presented 
and of merely represented sensations. "^ The first ele- 
ment leaves the individual without choice and the object 
presented without universality. The individual opens 
his eyes and beholds an object which he calls a tree ; 
the object is presented to him with sufficient coherence 
to produce a sensation out of which he forms a percep- 
tion, and a judgment, an idea, but the tree is particular- 
ized so far as the individual is concerned. However it 
exists and has its coherence in the divine mind and the 
mere experience arising from its observance or its 
presentation is not a matter of choice with the observer. 
The second element involves contingency or arbitra- 
tion on the part of the divine mind, and so far univer- 

• Cf. Principles Sec. i, and Berkeley's Works Vol. i, PP. 131-22. 
2 Life and Letters, P. 37S. 



19 

sality or objectivity. If there is a particular tree there 
must be also the possibility of the representative univer- 
sal tree. It is this universal that changes the object 
from a mere ideal idealism to a real idealism, or from a 
mere subjective phantasy to an objective reality. Sen- 
sations are independent of the recipient and the cause 
of sensations external to the recipient ; if this were not 
so, sensations could not be fleeting and the Ego per- 
manent, but sensations are fleeting as the experience of 
humanity universally testifies ; but the Ego is perman- 
ent,^ otherwise there could be no experience to offer 
such testimony, and whether there had ever been an 
experience or ever would be an experience other than 
the "now" would be impossible for us to know. On the 
other hand, sensations are dependent upon the recipi- 
ent, for to conceive of them existing as I now have 
them is impossible unless there is an I to be sentient of 
them.^ Sensations are therefore at the same time de- 
pendent and independent of the sentient being. All 
changes of sensation are independent of the will of the 
recipient, but the realization of the objective cause of 
the sensation is dependent upon the will of the percipi- 
ent. We see that there is here set forth an apparent 
contradiction in Berkeley's philosophy of the process of 
knowledge, and unless the problem is looked at strictly 
from the metaphysical standpoint there is a real con- 
tradiction. Prof. Bowne says, that "metaphysically 

' Berkeley's Works, Vol. i, n. P. 230. Pr. Sec. 142. 
* Commonplace Book, P. 481 . 



20 

Berkeley's theory of the externality of matter cannot be 
disproved, for without the will of God nothing can 
exist. "^ It is only necessary then to understand that the 
objective cause of a sensation is not absolute, but is 
dependent upon the activity, yea even upon the con- 
stant activity of the will of God ; in this existence there 
is a sufficient coherency permanently to contain all the 
elements necessary to the production of a sensation. 
The time of a sensation depends upon attendant circum- 
stances not necessary to be explained here. This co- 
herency of matter which makes it capable of perman- 
ently producing sensations, and by which sensations 
are thrust upon us whether we will or not, explains to 
us the sense in which a sensation is independent of the 
Me, of the sentient creature. This material object 
which causes the sensation is not a something created 
by a fiat of the Divine Will or power and cast out into 
space as an absolute and independent existence, as a 
thing-in-itself, but it is the manifestation of the Divine 
Will in a state of constant activity. This manifestation 
produces sensations in the percipient ; these sensations 
are caught up by the activity of the mind and made 
over into conceptions, the whole process resulting in 
knowledge. These two elements are the same two 
elements which Kant calls perception and conception. 
The chief difference is in the form of the dualism 
arising from these two elements and the manner or 
process of their synthesis. Let us pause here for a 

' Bowne's Metaphysics, P. 461. 



21 



moment and examine Berkeley's conception of those 
two elements in their separate relations to our know- 
ledge or experience. This apparent digression is 
necessary that we may understand the importance of 
Berkeley's attempt to do away with the schools of 
rationalism and empiricism and yet preserve their 
principles as fundamental elements in knowledge. 

First, let us inquire into Berkeley's notion of percep- 
tion. Perception is used now generally, in a somewhat 
different way than it was in the philosophy of Locke 
and Berkeley. The latter however develops perception 
through his term "suggestion"^ into an acquired per- 
ception of things, objects in space. Berkeley in his 
later philosophy made perception as necessary to ex- 
perience as experience was necessary to knowledge, 
and varied his psychological view until he may be in- 
terpreted as using the term perception much more in 
the Kantian sense than any of his predecessors had 
done. 

He foreshadows sometimes Kant's schematism in the 
succession of events and in the filling of a moment of 
time ;'* he says "extension, motion, time, each include the 
idea of succession." Number which consists of distinct 
perception, consists also of succession, for things which 
are at once perceived are jumbled together and mixed 
in the mind. Time and motion cannot be conceived 
without succession.^ It is clearly implied that here in 

' Selections from Berkeley, P. 158. 
' Commonplace Book, n. P. 471. 
" P. 42s. 



22 



the notion of perception, there can be no empty time 
and from what follows, that there can be no moment of 
time, at least of which we can have any knowledge, 
that is empty of sense perception, or external percep- 
tion. He continues by saying if it were not for sense 
(perception) the mind could ^have no knowledge, no 
thought at all.^ This statement of Berkeley is emphatic, 
and when interpreted simply means that thought cannot 
be merely analytic. Had Berkeley developed this prin- 
ciple he would have shown that the manifold, or things 
jumbled in the mind as he says, were not given to the 
mind as things ready made for the mind to act upon, 
but that they are the external manifestation of the Divine 
Will and are given to the mind as a whole, a mere im- 
pression, and that the activity of the mind made them 
as we know them i. e., there can be no absolute thing- 
in-itself given to the mind for it to work upon, but none 
the less a real and permanent manifestation of divine 
intelligence and activity which must be acted upon by 
our intelligence or understanding in order to become 
objectified. Without such a given manifold, thought 
either analytic or synthetic would be impossible ; all 
knowledge must then have two elements in it and must 
be synthetic, the process of this synthesis was to be de- 
veloped in the activity of the will and to be set forth in 
the contemplated treatise on the will. 

Berkeley makes no use of the imagination as a syn- 
thetic element of any kind, but very clearly distin- 

^ Commonplace Book, P. 434. 



23 

guishes between sense perception and the imagination. 
The perceptions have a steadiness, order, and coherence 
which are not found in the imagination, and to reduce 
Berkeley to a philosophy which gives no more perma- 
nence to the objective world of his idealism, than to the 
imaginary world is simply to advertise an ignorance of 
his whole system. I can do no better here to establish 
the permanence of Berkeley's phenomenal world than 
to quote two or three paragraphs from Prof. Fraser, 
taken from the "Life and Letters of Berkeley." 

"One actual sensation or group of sensations is the 
universal work of other sensations or groups of sensa- 
tions that are not at the time actual. This relation of 
sensible sign and its correlative, Berkeley would say, 
is only imaginable, meaning of substantiality or caus- 
ality, when they are attributed to essentially dependent 
and passive phenomena like those of sense. 

"Further still these practically all important relations 
of coexistence and succession among perceived sensa- 
tions are, a priori, at this point of view, arbitrary. 
That is to say, there is no uncreated or Divine necessity 
for their being what we find it to be, any sensation or 
group of sensations may be the constant or universal 
sign of any other. A priori, anything might be the 
physical co-constituent, and physical cause of any- 
thing ; for physical substance and causality are only 
the arbitrarily constituted signification of actual sen- 
sations. 

"Thus the only conceivable and practical, and for 



H 

us the only possible, substantiality in the material 
world is — permanence of coexistence or aggregation 
among sensations ; and the only conceivable and prac- 
tical, and for us the only possible, causality among 
phenomena is — permanence or invariableness among 
their successions. 

"These two are almost (but not quite) one. The 
actual or conscious coexistence of all the sensations 
which constitute a particular tree, or a particular moun- 
tain, cannot be simultaneously realized, a few coexistent 
visible signs, for instance, lead us to expect that the 
many other sensations of which the tree is the virtual 
co-constituent would gradually be perceived by us, if 
the conditions for our having actual sensations of all 
the other qualities were fulfilled. The substantiality 
and causality of matter thus resolve into a Universal 
Sense-Symbolism, the interpretation of which is the 
office of phj'sical science. The physical world is a 
system of interpretable signs, dependent for its actual 
existence in sense upon the sentient mind of the inter- 
preter ; but significant of guaranteed pains and pleas- 
ures, and the guaranteed means of avoiding and at- 
taining pains and pleasures ; significant too of other 
minds, and their thoughts, feelings and volitions ; and 
significant above all of Supreme mind through whose 
Activity, the signs are sustained, and whose Archetypal 
Ideas are the source of those universal or invariable 
relations of theirs which make them both practically 
and scientifically significant or objective. The per- 



25 

manence and efficiency attributed to matter is in God — 
in the constitutive Universals of Supreme Mind ; sen- 
sations or sense-given phenomena themselves and sen- 
sible things, so far as they consist of sensations, can be 
neither permanent nor efficient ; they are in constant 
flux." This constant flux is not the miraculous creat- 
ing and destroying of things, but the constant phe- 
nomenal change of the permanent in nature and fore- 
shadows the Kantian doctrine of the change in the 
permanent. "The material world — its substance or 
permanence, its powers, and its space — resolve them- 
selves into a flux of beautifully significant sensations, 
sense-ideas or sense-phenomena, which are perpetually 
sustained in existence by a Divine Reason and Will. 
It is so that the Berkelean Conception reconciles Plato 
with Protagoras."^ 

Permanence is therefore a necessary factor in the 
conditions of perception, but actual perception is not 
itself necessary to the external existence of bodies. 
The existence of bodies unperceived may be said to be 
only a potential existence, but it is an existence depend- 
ing upon the active powers of an intelligent being. 
This necessary activity is no less important in the phi- 
losophy of later thought than with Berkeley, the chief 
difference being the way the different schools of philoso- 
phy account for the principle of activity. 

Conception is a no less important factor in knowledge 
than perception, according to Berkeley. Concepts as 

^ Life and Letters of Berkeley, PP. 374-376. 



36 



such are not given to us intuitively ; a concept is not 
something given from the external world, it is thought. 
All things conceived by us, according to Berkeley, 
"are (a') thoughts, (b') powers to receive thoughts, 
and (c) powers to cause thoughts."^ External things 
are perceived but by perception alone cannot be known ; 
the active power of thought must form an element in 
the knowledge of any thing. This activity is necessary 
to the formation of a judgment, and the judgment must 
involve both a percept and a concept;^ the former is 
given through the senses, the latter is made out of the 
mind's activity ; it is a process of thought activity. 
The problem which has been so vexing to philosophers 
of all ages, viz., the distinction between perception and 
conception, did not greatly disturb Berkele}'^ in his 
problem of knowledge ; Berkeley had but one thing- 
in-itself, if you look at this one thing-in-itself from the 
standpoint of its outward manifestation you have per- 
ception, if you look at it from the side of its inward 
activity you have conception. Hence Berkeley did not 
have to contend with that kind of dualism which has 
been so annoying to man}'^ philosophers both before 
and since his time. He had a dualism^ of a different 
nature, but the very principle of his synthesis removed 
from him the annoying problems of separating percep- 
tion and conception, and the unifying of two things-in- 
themselves. 

^ Commonplace Book, P. 484. 

* " " P. 4S4. And Selections, n. P. 71. 

^ Life and Letters, P. 29. And Commonplace Book, 422. 



27 

The dualism of Berkeley was the dualism arising 
from setting the self over against the outer world, but 
in a very different way from that of Descartes, for the 
Cartesian idea or conception of the world was to Berke- 
ley a mere abstraction. Berkeley's dualism was not 
so much a dualism between percept and concept, as it 
was a dualism between concepts, between his own con- 
ception of the impossibility of anything existing in the 
universe unperceived or unwilled, and the common 
idea of the independent existence of matter.^ The 
synthesis of these concepts however would destroy the 
Cartesian dualism between mind and matter. Matter 
would no longer stand over against self, but it would 
be a manifestion of a self-conscious intelligence and 
would therefore be in self-consciousness. A synthetic 
activity by which such a dualism could be made into 
a unity was just as necessary in Berkeley's system as 
it was in Descartes' or in Kant's. Upon the synthetic 
activity which made this dualism into a unity depended 
the coherence and permanence of the external world 
which made experience a possibility. That unifying 
element is the Will. There is not one big Will, viz., 
the Divine Will which creates all these things of the 
objective world, and then a lot of little wills, one for 
each person, by which there is a realization of this 
creation ; there is but one Will and the manifestation of 
that Will objectively is the objective world, and the 
human will is the subjective manifestation of the Divine 

^ Life and Letters. P. 29. And Commonplace Book, P. 422. 



28 

Will, or is a differentiation of the one universal Will 
working through us, the development and realization 
of which tends toward a perfect intelligence which if 
ever attained to would mean a full realization of the 
Divine Will. This would be a complete knowledge of 
the objective world which would be the ultimate phil- 
osophical unity. Kant sought this unity by setting 
forth two things-in-themselves, one objective and one 
subjective, and then sought a process of knowledge by 
which he might synthesize the dualism thus made. 
Berkeley sought, by maintaining that there was but 
one thing-in-itself, viz., the subjective, to establish .a 
philosophy which would explain the external world 
and self-consciousness by showing that there was no 
external world outside of self-consciousness. 

The question now presents itself to us : What was , 
the synthetic activity by means of which Berkeley 
meant to reach his ultimate unity ? The question can 
be answered in a single word, it was the Will. What 
has already been said is to show that the process of 
knowledge does include the elements attributed to 
knowledge both by the empiricists and by the rational- 
ists, and by the idealists and the realists. The process 
by which the elements were to be synthesized and 
knowledge brought to an ideal unity was to be a pro- 
cess of the Will conteni-plated but not developed. 

Berkeley was not able to free himself from the notion 
of the Will as given to him from his study of Descartes. 
In the psychology of Descartes there are two funda- 



29 

mental modes of thought, viz., perception and volition ; 
in receiving ideas the mind is passive, its ideas are put 
into it partly by the objects which effect the senses, 
partly by the impressions in the brain and partly by the 
disposition or habits of the mind itself previously form- 
ed, and by the movements of the Will. The mind is 
active only in volitions. The Will therefore being 
more originative has more to do with true or false 
judgments than the understanding. In the perfection 
of man as well as in the nature of God, Will and in- 
tellect must be united. For thought, will is as neces- 
sary as understanding.^ 

A judgment is the work of the understanding : the 
affirming or denying of it is the work of the will. The 
will goes further than the understanding and may turn 
the understanding from the path of knowledge. There 
is nothing which the will cannot affirm or deny, accept 
or reject, or toward which it cannot occupy an attitude 
of indifference ; the will extends to the unknown as 
well as to the known, and can affirm or deny the one 
as well as the other; the will is therefore greater than 
the understanding. The understanding is limited to a 
definite sphere, the will is unlimited. Descartes says, 
"The will or the freedom of the will is of all my facul- 
ties the only one which, according to my experience, 
is so great that I cannot conceive a greater. It is this 
faculty pre-eminently by reason of which I believe I 
am created in the image of God. "^ 

• Bncyclopedia Britannica, Art. Descartes. 

2 History of Modern Philosophy. By Kuno Fischer, PP. 361-62. 



30 

Berkeley was a close student of Descartes and was 
influenced by his doctrine to regard the will as the 
unifying element in knowledge. 

Kant made self-consciousness the source of all the 
categories but could not know self-consciousness be- 
cause the categories could not be applied to it, yet he 
was absolutely certain that such an activity as self- 
consciousness existed. Berkeley made use of the will 
in the same relation, it was the activity of will that 
made self-consciousness possible, it contained all the 
categories, or rather it was the source of all the pro- 
cesses of knowledge, yet it could not be known because 
no idea could be formed of it, Kant would say no cate- 
gory could be applied to it. Berkeley had but one 
thing-in-itself viz., spirit, a living and conscious indi- 
vidual spirit, and his self identity arose by God working 
through thi^ individuality of spirit, and experience was 
made by placing this spirit as a unifier of experiences. 
This spirit was the active principle of mind, an activity 
which transcended Hume's idea of knowledge, which 
gave us as many states of consciousness as we had ex- 
periences. Berkeley's self-identity could not arise out 
of mere self-consciousness taken on the side of thought, 
for we cannot be conscious of self except as we set the 
self over against the outer external world ; self identity 
cannot be the result of mere consciousness, for if so 
then I could not possibly be the same person to-day I 
was twelve months ago.^ The transcendental unity of 

'Commonplace Book. P. 4S1. 



31 

apperception was not seen by Berkeley, but some 
identifying principle is necessary to self-consciousness, 
Berkeley therefore makes the active principle of will 
run through these states of consciousness and bind 
them into one unified identity.^ The objective essence 
of matter or the sense given non-ego was with Berkeley 
purely phenomenal or ideal, the essence of mind, the 
ego is substantial and causal.'-^ According to Berkeley's 
doctrine the identity of finite substance must consist in 
something more than mere continued existence, or 
relation to determined time and place of beginning to 
exist; the existence of our thoughts (which being com- 
bined make all substances) being frequently interrupt- 
ed they have divers beginnings and endings.^ The 
active principle of will is not only necessary to person- 
al identity, but is necessary to insure identity of any 
object. 

The will as a synthetic activity grows out of the fact 
that there is but one Intelligence, in which the will 
constitutes the fundamental active principle ; in other 
words, will is a homogeneous activity, if we can think 
of activity being homogeneous as we think of space 
being made up of homogeneous parts ; this being true 
our wills are to God's Will as a small portion of space 
is to the whole of space ; the difference being, that will 
as an activity may comprehend, or approach compre- 
hension of the parent will, while space in itself being 

•Commonplace Book, P. 4S1. 

* Berkeley's Works, Vol. 1, P. 230. Principles Sec. 142. 

•Commonplace Book, P. 4S1. 



32 

nothing but a mere abstraction remains to all space just 
as we place it. This being true whatever exists in 
God's Will must exist in our wills so far as our wills are 
made to comprehend God's Will, or in other words the 
complete comprehension or realization of God's Will 
would be the ultimate unity of the universe in our self- 
consciousness, which is the end of all philosophy and 
the banishment of all scepticism. 

To illustrate, a man begins with the colonization of 
America to manufacture woolen goods, the whole in- 
dustry of woolen goods is under his control ; if he has 
a disjunctive judgment, i. e., if he has an unconditioned 
and unlimited knowledge of the wants and demands of 
the people so far as the market for woolen goods is 
concerned and that knowledge develops with the trade 
and remains perfect and complete all the time he will 
have just enough factories, just enough machinery, just 
enough working men, and will make just enough goods 
to the yard of just the right kind to supply the demand. 
If the manufacturer could live through the whole devel- 
opment or evolution of trade and his judgment remain 
disjunctive all the time his knowledge would be a per- 
fect knowledge, a perfect unity of the totality or logical 
individual of the whole ; but if the manufacturer ceases 
to exercise his will in the running of his machinery no 
web will be produced, no factory will exist. The will 
constitutes the fundamental element in the disjunctive 
judgment of the manufacturer, and his subjects have a 
perfect knowledge of the whole trade in proportion to 



33 

the extent in which they comprehend the will of the 
manufacturer. 

Such is God's relation to the universe. He has a 
disjunctive judgment of the universe, the activity of will 
underlying it all ; there can therefore be no dualism 
whatever, there can be no two things-in-themselves ; 
there can be but one thing-in-itself, self-conscious spirit, 
and that spirit is active and its activity is the Will. The 
external world is not outside and foreign to that self- 
consciousness, but is a part of it and a method of its 
manifestation. There is not a separate will for each 
person, and a separate intelligence for each person, 
there is but one Will and that will workincr through us 
makes our wills, and produces in us a self activity by 
which we are capable of development. This process 
of development is bringing the external world into our 
self-consciousness and thus comprehending more or less 
of the Divine Will. We approach the unity of knowl- 
edge, the disjunctive judgment of the universe, in pro- 
portion to the complete comprehension of the parent 
will. 

Kant makes two things of perception and conception, 
but is not able to separate one from the other and define 
each separately ; so Berkeley gives a special volition- 
ating power and freedom to the human will, but does 
not separate it from the Divine Will. There is no 
necessary element of synthesis between the human and 
the divine wills, because from the very nature of the 
activity of will there is, to start with, no duality. 



34 

There must be a unity which underlies man's separa- 
tion from nature and it is by virtue of this unity that 
man can have a higher ideal of nature and may be able 
to realize the ideal thus formed. This brings us back 
to the origin of man and nature, both of which must be 
expressions of an intelligence ; and if there were no 
connecting link man would be entirely isolated from 
nature and could form no conception of it whatever, 
there could be no common principle. The unifying 
link is Will, in which is found two elements, first the 
power of forming conceptions of ends not already exist- 
ing, and second, the power of transforming the existing 
state of things so that these conceived ends become 
actual. This power of the will to frame ideals is due 
to the presence in it of a perfect intelligence ; the end 
man always has before him is the realization of this 
perfect intelligence, and the various particular ends are 
simply so many aspects of the realization of this perfect 
intelligence. Nature is only a partial manifestation and 
must be refashioned and worked over until it becomes a 
more adequate expression of the perfect intelligence, 
and that is the realization of the ideal in the develop- 
ment of will. Nature becomes a tool, an instrument of 
the will ; when we talk of subjugating the forces of 
nature we simply mean the bringing of them under the 
full control of the will ; this can only be explained by 
the unity of a higher intelligence.^ 

This modern conception of the will is precisely the 

^ Dewey's Lectures, Introduction to Philosophy. 



35 

outgrowth of the principles postulated by Berkeley and 
shows that Berkeley saw behind the veil what philoso- 
phers now see more clearly. Two hundred years of 
philosophic thought has removed partially the veil 
through which Berkeley saw but which he was not 
able to remove. This synthetic activity of the Will 
unites the dualism of concepts already referred to, 
gives coherence to the objective world, and changes 
our former conception of Berkeley's objective Idealism 
into an objective Realism differing not widely from the 
Empirical Realism of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.^ 

Dr. Bowne of our own time does not widely differ 
from this conception of Berkeley. He says, "Matter 
and material things have no ontological existence, but 
only a phenomenal existence. Their necessary de- 
pendence and lack of all subjectivity makes it impossi- 
ble to view them as capable of other than phenomenal 
existence. This world-view then contains the following 
factors ; (i) The Infinite energizes under the forms of 
space and time; (2) the system of energizing according 
to certain laws and principles, which system appears 
in thought as the external universe; and (3) finite 
spirits, who are in relation to this system, and in whose 
intuition the system takes on the forms of perception. 
This view is not well described as idealism, because it 
makes the world more than an idea."^ 

That experience may be possible bodies must and do 
exist without the mind, as the word mind is commonly 

' Kant's Doctrine of the Thing-in-itself, P. 67. 
* Bowne's Metaphysics, P. 466. 



36 

used, and Berkeley sets forth very clearly how it is 
possible to have a body exist without the mind, or the 
difference between a body existing within the mind and 
one existing without the mind. His explanation would 
be about on this wise; every idea has a cause i. e., is 
produced by a will. Every phenomenon is sustained 
by a free intelligent agent. Without the activity of the 
mind, without the exercise of the Will of the Deity 
nothing could exist, and no longer can anything exist 
than the Divine Will continues to act ; the moment the 
activity of the Divine Will ceases, that moment the 
object of reality must become a nonentity. The Divine 
Will is an activity and things do actually exist, and 
since our wills are part of the Divine Will we are re- 
quired only to fulfill the necessary conditions and we 
have perception ; the conditions of the perception of a 
thing remain unchanged whether willed directly by the 
Divine Will, as a mountain, a tree, etc., or worked out 
indirectly through human agency, as a library. So far 
as our self-consciousness is concerned they exist or 
non-exist according to the potential or actual fulfillment 
or non-fulfillment of the conditions of perception. The 
perception once having been formed the existence is 
made real and. legitimate by means of the imagination 
without the re-fulfillment of the conditions of per- 
ception. What is the difference between the reality 
of the library which I have perceived and left 
and now recall by the faculty of imagination, 
and the fanciful library which I may call up and 



37 

arrange in the adjoining room, which in reality is 
nothing but fancy ? In the former the Divine Will and 
intelligence has worked it out through human agency 
and hence it has sufficient coherence to fulfill all the 
conditions of sense perception. In the second case the 
Divine Will has not acted upon the fanciful library, and 
the conditions of perception have not been provided. 
Hence in the latter the library is merely ideal, while in 
the former it is really ideal, or if you please, objectively 
ideal as well as subjectively ideal. This existence 
when not perceived however is but a potential existence 
in the Divine Will and Thought. Bodies do exist 
when not perceived — they being powers in the active 
being. ^ 

The existence of bodies with Berkeley is not a mere 
fancy of the mind, neither is it a continual miracle 
wrought by divine power, yet both these positions have 
been charged upon him in spite of his persistent denial 
of any such belief, or of any such doctrine with respect 
to the existence of reality in the objective world. The 
existence of the phenomenal world is just as necessary 
to experience in the philosophy of Berkeley as it is in 
the philosophy of Kant ; further, the mere existence is 
not sufficient to produce an experience, there must be a 
synthesis, a necessary connection in this phenomenal 
world, otherwise neither world nor experience would 
be possible.^ It is true that Berkeley did not system- 
atize his theory of synthesis and necessary connection 

' Commonplace Book, P. 471. 

- Berkeley-Blackwood's Classics, P. 194 



38 

as did later philosophers. He took more for granted, 
but his place in the philosophic world should not be 
underestimated on that account ; since philosophers 
have been trying for two hundred years to complete a 
system of synthesis and have not succeeded to the 
satisfaction of all, it would hardly be expected that the 
man who originated the idea would culminate the doc- 
trine. It was as creditable for him to postulate such a 
philosophy even in isolated thoughts as it was for his 
followers to take those thoughts and make a system 
of them. 

There have been three leading theories for the ex- 
istence of the material universe maintained and develop- 
ed, viz., the Abstractly Objective theory in which there 
is a static something that contains the idea of unity 
when it is separated from the qualities or from the 
multiplicity of the external world; it is simply the idea 
of the identity separated and abstracted from the differ- 
ences. Instead of getting a unity of the differences 
and qualities, we get a unity separated from the quali- 
ties and underlying not one thing alone but all things. 

The second of these theories is the Abstractly Sub- 
jective theory, in which the idea of a real unity is a 
fiction of the mind. It denies the existence of sub- 
stance and somehow places a lot of attributes in the 
mind in such a way as to make the phenomenal world 
appear as it does. It takes the side of multiplicity or 
difference and holds it apart from unity. 

The third of these theories is the more modern and 



39 

concerns itself with the fact that matter is the unity of 
and in things. It holds that a thing is a dynamic inter- 
relation of qualities, the unity being ideal. There is 
then no unity of substance apart from the qualities, the 
unity is simply the fact that the qualities after all have 
one end or function to which they are all subordinate. 
To understand this theory is to understand philoso- 
phy. 

To which of these theories does Berkeley adhere ? 
Certainly not to the first, for such a conception of the 
external world was to him a contradiction, and lacked 
all the elements of true philosophy. Neither can he be 
classed with the second, for unity would then be a mere 
fiction of the mind made up for the purpose of explain- 
ing permanence in the external world ; it would rob 
him of his unity and by so doing destroy the possibility 
of experience or of an external world at all. He could 
not be classed with the third for his source of unity was 
postulated, and consisted of an unrealized system, 
rather than a formulated and realized or philosophic 
system of synthesis by which a unity is made rather 
tlian given. He is a cross between the second, the 
Abstractly Subjective theory, and the third which we 
may call the theory of Dynamic Inter-relation, with the 
constant tendency of his philosophy, as set forth in his 
Commonplace Book toward the latter. The more he 
studied the great problem of philosophy the more he 
gave up the Abstractly Subjective theory and swung 
round toward the theory of Dynamic inter-relation, and 



40 • 

even approached it so far as to express in an isolated 
way nearly all its underlying principles. 

The question between the materialist and me, says 
Berkeley, "is not whether things have a real existence 
out of the mind of this or that person, but, whether 
they have an absolute existence distinct from being per- 
ceived by God, and external to all mind." There is no 
difference between this doctrine of existence and that of 
the third theory above referred to except the mere fact 
that Berkeley uses the word God instead of Intelligence 
or Self-consciousness, which the school of the dynamic 
theory would have used, in order that they might not 
be charged with dogmatism. The metaphysical princi- 
ple is just the same, and the ultimate end sought by 
Berkeley and the advocates of the dynamic theory was 
the same. They differed only in their methods of 
attaining the end. When the latter attempt to explain 
the origin of self-consciousness-in-itself, or the origin of 
the thing-in-itself, or if they deny the existence of these 
factors in themselves and attempt to explain the origin 
of the unity of which these factors are component parts 
they are driven back to Berkeley's God or landed in 
hopeless chaotic agnosticism. 

"Sense and Experience acquaint us with the course 
and analogy of appearances or natural effects. 
Thought, Reason, Intellect introduce us into the 
knowledge of their causes. Sensible appearances, 
though of a flowing, unstable, and uncertain nature, 
yet having first occupied the mind, they do by an early 



41 

prevention render the aftertask of thought more diffi- 
cult; and, as they amuse the eyes and ears, and are 
more suited to vulgar uses and the mechanic arts of 
life, they early obtain a preference, in the opinion of 
most men, to those superior principles, which are the 
later growth of the human mind, arrived to maturity 
and perfection, but, Jiot affecting the corporeal sense, 
are thought to be so far deficient in point of solidity and 
reality — sensible and real, to common apprehensions, 
being the same thing. Although it be certain that the 
■principles of science are neither objects of Sense nor 
Imagination ; and that Intellect and Reason are alone 
the sure guides to truth. "^ 

In this expression of Berkeley's later philosophy he 
shows the importance of the faculty of Reason, in our 
knowledge. The universal laws which make mathe- 
matics and physics reducible to a science are not ob- 
jects of sense, nor of imagination. However he does 
not drop out the element of sense, for if he did he 
would destroy experience, without which there could 
be no such thing as knowledge. Prof. Fraser in com- 
menting on the section here referred to, observes that 
Berkeley speaks lightly of the reality of sensible things. 
Prof. Fraser for the most part shows a very comprehen- 
sive and accurate knowledge of Berkeley's philosophy 
but certainly has not grasped the meaning of the sec- 
tion under discussion. Berkeley has shown, prior to 
the production of this later work, by his New Theory 

* Siris. Sec. 264. 



42 

of Vision, and by his Theory of Visual Language, that 
the organs of sense are not always accurate interpreters 
of things presented to us under the laws and conditions 
of perception, and that furthermore the same organ of 
sense under different circumstances and under varied 
conditions will interpret a thing one way at one time 
and in a different way at another time, the apparent in- 
stability and uncertainty of such reality is therefore the 
result of the way you modify the conditions of percep- 
tion and not, as Prof. Fraser observes, a depreciation of 
the reality of the thing itself; the view is then in per- 
fect harmony with his former view of reality and needs 
no reconciliation. If Berkeley had changed his view 
of reality as Prof. Fraser suggests, he must have 
changed his view of the unchangeableness of God, for 
such a change could only come about by the oscillation 
of the Will of God ; such a charge would be an insult 
to the memory of the Philosopher, and Prof. Fraser did 
not mean to make such a charge, he simple missed the 
meaning that Berkeley meant to convey in the passage 
under consideration. 

In the process of knowledge thus developed and the 
Unity arrived at by making Will a synthetic activity, 
Berkeley has not attempted to separate the Will from 
the Reason, but has given Reason its legitimate place 
in knowledge which when taken in connection with 
what precedes shows Berkeley to have been much less 
dogmatical than his critics would have us believe him 
to have been. Let us then examine Reason and see 



43 

whether we can find in it that gradation of faculties or 
activities by which the Deity is postulated as the high- 
est category in knowledge, or in which the Deity must 
ultimately become the highest category in knowledge. 
It is necessary to pass through reason, to reach the 
highest category, but it must be remembered that the 
Will from its very nature as a synthetic activity, and 
from its connection with the Divine Will underlies 
Reason and renders it efficient in knowledge just the 
same as it underlies other activities of the mind. What 
follows therefore in respect to Reason must not be taken 
as isolated from Will but only as one movement in the 
activity of Will. 

Sense perceptions^ introduce us to the fact that we 
have an external world around us, and that out of that 
external existence or rather by observation of it, we dis- 
cover certain unalterable laws, but this is not a satis- 
factory knowledge of things, we are not sure that the 
laws are unalterable, our observation may not be suffi- 
cient to justify us in saying that what we have observ- 
ed will always under all conditions be the same or even 
under the same conditions will never change. We are 
not sure we can universalize with certainty what we 
have postulated. 2 There must be another element viz., 
Reason. Reason is the judge on the bench in Berke- 
ley's intellectual world.' Reason introduces us to the 
possibility of the universal laws which we think we 

• Siris, Sec. J64, Selections a., P. 330. 

» Introduction to Selections, P. XXIII. 

* Siris, Sec. 303. 



44 

have discovered from mere observation;^ through the 
faculty of reason we are able to look into the causes of 
all empirical knowledge. Reason forms the perman- 
ent in knowledge, while sensations or perceptions are 
in themselves fluctuating and unstable. Reason also 
sits in judgment on the imaginations, and enables us to 
determine what is a mere imaginary fancy and to 
separate it from what is permanent in the objective 
world. The former is nothing more than a dream and 
has not sufficient coherence to fulfill the conditions of 
perception even when it appears in the imagination for 
the first time ; and under no conditions can a fanciful 
image be reproduced in the mind as it was first given. 
The latter constitutes the objective world in its reality 
and has sufficient coherence to fulfill the conditions of 
perception. It is ideally real and permanent. The 
acts of Reason by which knowledge is made permanent 
become new objects to the understanding ; in them we 
find the graduation of the faculties leading us from a 
lower to a higher plane of knowledge until we reach 
the highest which is the Deity. '^ This process which is 
implied and partly developed in the Siris and practi- 
cally outlined in the Commonplace Book is a process 
of knowledge not widely different in its application to 
the understanding from the categories of Kant, and 
even going far beyond Kant in reaching the highest 
category. Kant stops with the category of reciprocity 
and leaves himself in a contradiction with respect to the 

^ Siris, Sec. 264. 

= Siris, Sec. 303. Selections, n., P. 345. 



45 

knowledge of self-consciousness ; later philosophers 
have carried Kant's principles much further and have 
made purpose, self-consciousness, etc., categories and 
continuing in the same process must find the highest 
category in the Deity. Berkeley did this long before 
but did not formulate it. 

With Berkeley, nature is "reason immersed in mat- 
ter." Philosophy is the endeavor fully to disengage 
the immanent reason.^ Philosophy does not attempt to 
disengage reason, and set it over against matter thus 
making two abstractions and forming a dualism with 
such a chasm between the two elements as to render 
the possibility of unity hopeless, but to disengage the 
immanent reason for the purpose of giving it a greater 
leverage and to enable it to transform matter and mind 
into one comprehensive ideal unity which may contain 
two elements one involved in the other with such a 
complete synthesis that absolutely no dualism will 
appear. 

Prof. Morris said of Berkeley, "He saw perfectly 
well that it makes a world-wide difference whether, as 
a so-called idealist, you find the absolute radical and 
essence of universal being in living, knowable spirit, or 
in an unliving and intrinsically unknowable something, 
conventionally termed — Matter. In the former is given 
a vital principle, possessed of a faculty, to wit. Reason, 
capable of accounting for the visible order and invari- 
able law of concrete phenomena, and of a power, 

* Berkeley-Blackwood's Classics, P. 206. 



46 

namely, Will competent to be the source of the incess- 
ant motive of phenomena, or of their miscalled forces."^ 

Berkeley's Reason like that of Kant leads us to the 
highest possible unity in knowledge, viz., the Deity. 
He says, "there may be demonstrations used even in 
Divinity. I mean revealed Theology, as contradisting- 
uished from natural ; for though the principles may be 
founded in faith yet this hinders not but that legitimate 
demonstrations might be built thereon. Provided still 
that we define the words we use, and never go beyond 
our ideas. . . . But to pretend to reason or demon- 
strate any thing about the Trinity is absurd. Here an 
implicit faith becomes us."^ 

Having thus briefly pointed out the process by which 
Berkeley would lead us through the various stages in 
the process of knowledge, let us turn for a few moments 
to the active principle of knowledge as found in the 
Critique of Pure Reason by Kant. 



* British Thoughts and Thinkers, P, 216. 

* Commonplace Book, PP. 438-439. 



III. 

kant's transcendental ego. 

In attempting to examine the Transcendental Ego of 
Kant as a factor in knowledge it is necessary for us to 
free our minds if possible of the concept of the Ego as 
an object. Indeed we must free our minds of any con- 
cept at all, for a concept is just the thing it is not. It is 
a thinking activity. "Through this I or He or It (the 
thing) which thinks," Kant says, "nothing is set before 
our consciousness except a transcendental subject^x."^ 

In order to define to some extent this thingless thing 
or activity let us examine some of the phrases or terms 
which represent it. It has been called the "I," the 
«'I Think," the "Absolute Unity of Thinking Subject," 
the "Unity of Pure Self-consciousness," the "Self 
Originative and Self Illuminative Act or Activity," the 
"Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception," the 
"Transcendental Unity of Apperception," the "Orig- 
inal Primary Apperception," "Pure Apperception," 
"Transcendental Self," etc. The various shades of 
meaning which these predicates present to our minds 
show us something of the difficulty arising out of an 
attempt to define a thing which is no-thing. 

The transcendental self is the functional unity back 

» Critical Philosophy of Kant. By Caird. Vol. II. P. 26. 



48 

of all knowledge and works through the individual. It 
is a synthetic activity which makes experience by mak- 
ing a complete unity. 

The fact that we speak of a synthetic unity implies, 
at least, something to unite ; this something when de- 
fined will be found to be the I and the external world. 
This gives us the starting point of Metaphysics. We 
cannot say I am I until we reach this stage, neither can 
we have metaphysics until we can say I am I ; for until 
we are able to separate the I from the world we are 
completely overwhelmed by the world. We can neither 
criticize the world nor judge of it until we are able to 
get outside of it, i. e., until we are able to separate our- 
selves from the world and set ourselves over against 
the world. But having made such a separation we 
have not reached the ultimatum in knowledge. We 
have only begun the freedom of thought ; if we were 
to stop herg we should be in slavery so far as intelli- 
gence is concerned. That is if thought found here a 
resting place where it could stand still, it would-be in 
abject slavery, there would be no further movement 
possible for thought ; but such is not the case, it is 
necessary for us to get outside the world in order that 
we may be able to lift the world up to our own standard. 
It does not follow from this that there is a dualism and 
that the I set over against the external world is entirely 
foreign to the external world. It does not of necessity 
imply a dualism fundamentally, but it does imply that 
we can have no metaphysical starting place until the 



49 

movement of thought has reached that stage in which 
by process of analysis of the original reality it is able 
to make such division and set the one over against the 
other. When the analysis of the original reality has 
been made and we have set thought over against matter, 
have we entirely separated thought from the material 
world and made it capable of acting within itself? This 
gives rise to the question, is thought analytic? Descar- 
tes said cogito ergo sum and in the statement made 
thought purely analytic ; he did more than that, he 
rendered the Self knowable in the sense that the 
Kantian categories could be applied to it, for "without 
some empirical representation, which presents to the 
mind material for thought, the judgment 'I think' could 
not be formed."^ Descartes' proposition reduces to the 
form "I am thinking" or that "I exist thinking," he 
"was wrong in inferring the I exist from the I think, 
for his major premise must be every thinking being 
exists, which would not be true, as it would assert that 
the property thought constitutes all beings possessing it 
necessary beings."^ The criticism Kant offers on Des- 
cartes' proposition is not a criticism against the fact that 
thought was and is analytic, but against the proposition 
as being one which objectifies the transcendental self; 
this could not be true in the system of Kant as he pro- 
ceeds to prove. That Descartes' proposition made the 
self determinable by the categories follows from the fact 

» Kant's Critical Philosophy. By Mahaffy. P. 272. 
a .< .. .< .. .. p, 273. 



50 

that to say 'I exist thinking' expresses "more than the 
spontaneity of pure thought;" it expresses, "in fact, 
a determination of the subject as present to itself in per- 
ception."^ "If on the other hand, I concentrate my 
attention upon the mere logical function of thought — 
"the pure spontaneity of the combination of the mani- 
fold of a merely possible perception, either as I am or 
as I appear to myself, but I am thinking of myself only 
as I might think of any object from the manner of the 
perception of which I abstract. If, then, I represent 
myself in this point of view as a subject of thought, or 
even as a ground of thinking, this does not mean that I 
apply to myself the categories of substance and causal- 
ity ; for these categories are not the bare conceptions 
of subject and ground, but these functions of thought 
as already applied to our sensuous perception. Now, 
such application of the categories would, indeed, be 
necessary if I wished to know myself as an object 
through them. But, exhypothesi, I wish to be con- 
scious of myself only as a thinking subject, I, therefore, 
set aside the consideration of how I am given to myself 
in perception (which may, indeed, present me to my- 
self, though only as phenomenon.) And thus, in the 
consciousness of myself in mere thought, I come back 
upon the being which for me underlies all being {bm 
ich das Wesen selbst), but which is not thereby given 
in such a way that thought can determine it."^ The 

1 Critical Philosophy of Kant. By Caird. Vol. II, P. 29. 

2 « " " " " " Vol. II, PP. 29-30. 



51 

self Descartes set forth was the empirical self and was 
an object among so many other objects and not the self 
that knows. The self that knows is transcendental and 
is itself unknowable but is thinkable. 

Kant's criticism as has been said was not made on 
Descartes because the latter held that thought was 
analytic and therefore independent of the material 
world, but because Descartes made the self one object 
among other objects, and made it possible to apply the 
categories to it. That the criticism was on this basis is 
clear for Kant himself held, erroneously as we shall 
see, that thought was analytic, and that it was set over 
against the manifold and that the manifold was an 
entirely foreign element which must in some way be 
brought in contract with the self or with thought, and 
that thought and the manifold were to be exploded and 
in the explosion they would be united into a new and 
third thing viz., knowledge or experience, just as 
Oxygen and Hydrogen exploded together make a new 
and third substance — water. But in order that oxygen 
and hydrogen be exploded and we get a third sub- 
stance, water, there must be applied the active energy, 
heat. So with the former in order that thought and the 
manifold may be exploded into knowledge there must 
be present the energy or activity which Kant calls the 
Transcendental Self or Unity of Apperception. 

We shall understand more fully the nature of this 
activity if we compare it with the noumenon and dis- 
tinguish it from the Empirical self. The empirical self 



52 

is the self we know and not the self that knows, it is 
simply one object among so many other objects with 
this scientific inferiority that it is an object of inner 
sense only and we cannot therefore apply to it those 
mathematical appliances which can be applied to exter- 
nal objects. The fact that there is not a suflHcient uni- 
versal or thread of unity in the empirical self to make 
it a sure basis for a pure science, renders a pure science 
of Empirical Psychology impossible. The empirical 
self is a unity, but it is only a unity in any one experi- 
ence and not a unity which makes experiences into an 
experience. It is a ready made unity at any given time, 
it is the self Hume had constantly in mind in the devel- 
opment of his philosophy. But the transcendental self 
is the unity of thought involved in knowledge, it is a 
subject of thought but not an object of knowledge ; it 
is not an object at all, if it were it would be subject to 
the forms of time and space. Every object is subject to 
the forms of time and space and must have a sensuous 
content and be determinable by the categories. This is 
just what the transcendental ego is not ; it is not subject 
to the forms of time and space, it does not have a sen- 
suous content, it is not determinable by the categories, 
but it is on the other hand the source of the categories, it 
is logically the basis of the possibility of experience and 
cannot be thought of as an object among other objects. 
It was just this fact, this reducing the transcendental 
self to an object and then calling that object a soul that 
led to the fallacies of Rational Psychology which Kant 



53 

sets forth in his Paralogisms. Again the transcendental 
self cannot be thought an object among other objects 
for of itself and in itself it is a mere abstraction, it is 
empty of all content, and so long as we stay in this 
mere empty abstraction we cannot get a conception of 
an object at all ; neither can we merge from this mere 
abstraction without the manifold of sense being given 
for thought to work upon, to move out upon. It is this 
element or activity presupposed that renders a judgment 
possible, even the simplest judgment I am I would not 
be possible if there were not this presupposed content 
given for thought to act upon. The self, then, is 
another way of saying that "thinking thinks some- 
thing." 

It now remains for us to examine the relation of the 
Transcendental Ego to the Noumenon. The chapter 
in the Critique of Pure Reason which leads us from the 
phenomena to the noumena is the chapter that leads 
from the categories of the understanding to the Ideas 
of reason. This passing from the phenomena to the 
noumena is of the same nature but of a higher order 
than the passing from the Mathematical categories to 
the Dynamical categories. In the latter Kant does not 
give us any thing new, he simply gives us a deeper and 
truer view of the object under consideration. The 
mathematical categories constitute individual phenom- 
ena, the dynamical categories regulate this same indi- 
vidual phenomena and the two taken together constitute 
experience. Now when we pass from the categories 



54 

of the understanding to the Ideas of Reason, we find 
the Ideas of Reason do not constitute experience but 
they do regulate experience, hence they bear the same 
relation to the categories of the understanding that the 
dynamical categories bear to the mathematical cate- 
gories. The Ideas are necessary postulates, they are, 
if you please, the categories of Reason. Now, Reason 
as a unifying power must of necessity have on the sub- 
jective side the unifying element of self-consciousness, 
and on the objective side the unifying element or sub- 
stratum of phenomena. The former Kant calls the 
Transcendental Ego, the latter the Noumenon. The 
former we have to some extent already defined, the 
latter will now be briefly considered. "The Noume- 
non," says Kant, "is a bounding concept (Crenzbegriff), 
repressing the pretensions of sensibility, not invented 
at random, but necessarily and unavoidably connected 
with the limitation of sensibility."^ The noumenon is a 
purely negative boundary, a kind of warning that there 
is something existing behind mere phenomenon ; it is 
not one thing bounding another thing, it is simply a 
bounding concept. We cannot know the noumenon 
any more than we can know the transcendental self. 
It is not a somewhat to which categories can be applied. 
The noumenon is the mental attitude, the mental stand- 
point from which we look at an object ; in this it differs 
from the A-bsolute of Spencer. The existence of the 
Absolute of Spencer is a matter of knowledge. He 

* Kant's Critical Philosophy. By Mahaffy. P. 227. 



55 

shows, or attempts to show, that all we know is relative ; 
this relativity itself necessitates the showing that the 
Absolute exists but is unknowable, he could not admit 
that the Absolute could not be a conception in the mind. 
Kant goes further than Spencer, he has a bounding 
concept, which is outside of the phenomenon ; it is the 
standpoint from which we look at the phenomenon. In 
Kant's treatment of the thing-in-itself and the noumenon 
they are not necessarily the same, but if we carry the 
system to its logical conclusion, i. e., if we go on 
beyond Kant to what would be the logical outcome of 
his s3^stem if fully developed, they become identical. 
The thing-in-itself holds the same relation to the cate- 
gories of the understanding that the noumenon does to 
the Ideas of Reason. The transcendental self is the 
unity of apperception, the source of all synthesis, the 
source of the categories. In nearly the same sense 
the noumenon is the source of the Ideas of Reason, or 
to speak more accurately, perhaps, the noumena are 
the Ideas of Reason, the ideals which can never be 
realized but which must be postulated. In other words, 
the noumenon bears the same relation to the Ideas of 
Reason that self-consciousness does to the categories of 
the understanding. The transcendental self as has 
been said, is the functional unity back of ail knowledge 
and works through the individual ; so far as it carries 
out its unifying activity and realizes itself we have the 
noumenon. Noumenon is not therefore an idea of faith, 
as Kant makes it, but it is an actual existence, it must 



5^ 

exist in phenomenon. The Ideas are not therefore 
mere fancies, they are higher categories and in ap- 
proaching them we find no break in the logical thought. 

We have observed in thus briefly defining the Trans- 
cendental Ego and comparing it with the Empirical 
Ego and the Noumenon, that Kant gives us an imper- 
fect and somewhat defective knowledge of it, and in 
order to get a knowledge of it which is at all satisfactory 
we must go beyond Kant. The same thing is true 
when we turn from the discussion of what it is to the 
discussion of its function in knowledge which is the 
next step in this investigation. 

Its function in knowledge, as has been indicated in 
its definition is that of a synthesizing activity. Robert 
Adamson says, "No connection or representation of 
ideas is possible, unless all of them can be accompanied 
by the pure logical form of self-consciousness, I think. 
Consciousness of the unity and identity of Self is nec- 
essary for all representations, as otherwise they could 
not he ybr me, could not form parts of my experience. 
But just as unity is not apart from difference, so con- 
sciousness of unity itself is only possible if difference, 
plurality or manifold be given. "^ This is simply 
another way of saying that if we remove from knowl- 
edge the synthesizing activity of the Self we destroy 
the possibility of experience. The self is that synthetic 
activity which makes it possible for us to have a repre- 
sentation ; remove the activity of self and the / would 

1 On the Philosophy of Kant. By Robert Adamson. 



57 

become rigidly empirical and would be set over against 
the external world, but we should never be conscious 
of it. It would become impossible for me to say I am 
I for I could have no such consciousness, but Kant held 
otherwise ; he thought it possible to make the simple 
judgment I am I but thought it impossible to ever move 
out of the narrow circle thus formed in that primary 
simple judgment. "Kant speaks of the self as if it had 
a sort of independent reality of its own, apart from all 
relations to the other elements of knowledge. 1=1 is, 
he says, a purely analytic proposition."^ This is one 
of the causes of confusion in Kant's critique, but we 
must not be led astray by it. It arises with the idea 
that thought is analytic, but if we take Kant in his true 
meaning we shall not take such statements as the above 
to mean that the Transcendental Ego can be objectified, 
neither can we think of it as having a content indepen- 
dent of the manifold which is given as it were for 
thought to work upon. 

If thought were purely analytic and we could make 
the simple judgment I am I, without the aid of the 
manifold, metaphysics would be rendered impossible. 
It is just at this point that many students of Kant be- 
came confused, and declare him contradictory and 
unintelligible ; if, indeed, we were to accept Kant's 
bare statement of the proposition I am I as an evidence 
that thought is purely analytic, and take the statement 
as isolated from the body of the Critique he would be 

' Kant and his English Critics. By John Watson. P. 140. 



58 

contradictory and his whole system on that basis would 
go to show that metaphysics is impossible. But to 
understand the meaning of Kant we must modify the 
statement that thought is purely analytic by the teach- 
ing of the Critique as a whole which clearly implies 
that synthesis is implicit at least in the analytic propo- 
sition, if not clearly presupposed in it. In the most 
critical and literal interpretation of Kant's analytic 
proposition I am I, it must still contain implicit synthe- 
sis just as certainly and just as effectually as the abstract 
Being of Hegel contains implicit concreteness, yet no 
careful student of Hegel will deny that his abstract 
Being does contain an implicit concreteness. 

The transcendental unity of apperception was implicit 
to Kant even in the analytic proposition, and it was 
because of this implicitness that Kant thought the I 
could set itself over against the world as being indepen- 
dent of the world and at the same time be conscious of 
the judgment, of the fact that it had set itself off and 
had not objectified itself, or made it possible to apply 
the categories to it. 

"The Ego is not merely a power of theoretical cog- 
nition, which power alone is treated of in the Critique 
of Pure Reason, it is also a power of practical acting 
or willing, and finally a power of relating its cognitions 
to its willing, or a power of judgment."^ But before 
we have a relating power we must have something to 
relate, something to unite, i. e., we must have a condi- 

1 Journal, Speculative Philosophy, Vol. Ill, P. 134. 



59 

tion ; we can not have a condition without a conditioned, 
and the uUimate end of our science must be to find out 
what would be the outgrowth of the union of the 
condition and conditioned. The origin of the sen- 
sations in the Ego was not the problem of the Critique 
of Pure Reason so far as Kant was concerned with that 
problem ; that we had a manifold which gave us sensa- 
tions was granted by all, just what that manifold was 
did not yet concern Kant. The problem is, how is it 
possible for us to get an experience out of this manifold 
or how is it possible to get thought and the manifold 
into a unity? 

This unity can only be accomplished by the synthetic 
unity of apperception, it is the synthetic unity of apper- 
ception, and without the consciousness of such a 
synthesis we could have nothing more than the frag- 
mentary unity which is the empirical consciousness or 
self. 

"Necessity is always founded on transcendental con- 
ditions. There must, therefore, be a transcendental 
ground of the unity of our consciousness in the syn- 
thesis of the manifold of all our intuitions, therefore of 
all Concepts of objects in general .... for the object 
is no more than that something of which the concept 
predicates such a necessity of synthesis. 

"That original and transcendental condition is noth- 
ing else but what I call transcendental a-p^erce^tion. 
The consciousness of oneself, according to the deter- 
minations of our state, is, with all our internal percep- 



6o 



tion, empirical only, and always transient. There can 
be no fixed or permanent self in that stream of internal 
phenomena. It is generally called the internal sense, 
or empirical apperception. . . . No knowledge can 
take place in us, no conjunction or unity of one kind of 
knowledge with another, without that unity of con- 
sciousness which precedes all data of intuition and 
without reference to which no representation of objects 
is possible. This pure, original, and unchangeable 
consciousness I shall call Transcendental A-pfercej^- 
tion.''^ The complete unity of thought and the manifold 
in and of itself is not sufficient to give us knowledge or 
experience but we must of necessity be conscious of the 
unity. The origin of the manifold must be left out of 
sight in order to fully understand Kant. If Kant were 
driven to give an account of the origin of the manifold 
in so far he would be crowded back to the so-called 
Berkeleyan dogmatism ; but Kant is not concerned with 
that problem. Kant's problem is : Given a universe — 
how shall we know it? Where he goes beyond those 
who preceded him is in the use and application of the 
principle of apperception. 

The synthetic activity or active principle of unity 
which is so prominent in Kant's philosophy, requires 
something to be united, on one hand the manifold of 
sense and on the other various functions of unity, the 
categories, it is only because of these functions of unity 
acting upon the manifold as a background that the most 

* Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. by Miiller. PP. 94-95. 



6i 

simple judgment 1=1 is possible. Now in so far as 
these functions of unity by acting upon the manifold of 
sense make it into one complete whole we have self- 
consciousness, and in so far as we thus reach self-con- 
sciousness experience becomes thought manifested. 
Kant's categories are nowhere given to us as organic 
unities, but through their functional activity upon the 
manifold of sense we get a unity which is organic. The 
seeming conflict here is removed when we realize that 
we actually start with an organic unity and arrive at an 
organic unity. If Kant had not taught better than he 
knew this would have been a serious difficulty. Kant 
presupposes a synthesis, an organic unity to start with, 
but not intentionally on his part, nevertheless true for 
if he had not so done he could not have deduced the 
categories ; the categories would have been impossible 
from Kant's standpoint, neither could we be conscious 
of the simplest judgment, but with Kant's conception of 
the process of knowledge he makes a long and some- 
what circuitous effort to unite what he regards as two 
foreign (to each other) elements in knowledge. Kant's 
error arises out of the thought of two things-in-them- 
selves, an objective and a subjective ; the former gives 
us perception, the latter conception. Perception and 
conception therefore, are absolutely separated one from 
the other and must be united. The synthesis of imagi- 
nation must be brought into play before the unity of 
apperception can complete the ultimate unity desired. 
By this process Kant succeeded in doing away with the 



62 



dualism of perception and conception as such but not with 
the dualism of the perceptive and conceptive elements in 
knowledge. This process unifies the external world and 
brings it into self-consciousness, and thus enables us to 
know it, but no more. The categories are here brought 
to a stand-still, they can go as high as the category of 
reciprocity and no higher ; the moment we go beyond 
that, that moment we leave the domain of the knowable 
for the domain of the unknowable. We know that 
there is a self-consciousness, without which there can 
be no knowledge, but we cannot know the self-con- 
sciousness. We must think self-consciousness, freedom, 
immortality, and God, but we can know nothing of 
them. 

The chief sources of confusion in the study of the 
Critique of Pure Reason are (a) Kant held that thought 
was purely analytic, (b) that the manifold was foreign 
to thought and (c) he treated the subject as if thought 
were synthetic and the manifold a part of thought. 
The difficulties immediately become apparent when we 
take these conflicting premises under consideration. 
Kant proceeds from the first of these premises to deduce 
categories out of that from which no category can be 
had. To hold that thought is purely analytic, and from 
that purely analytic element to deduce categories which 
are themselves functional activities of synthesis is itself 
a contradiction. The question naturally arises why is 
it impossible for us to deduce the categories of the un- 
derstanding if thought be analytic. It is impossible 



63 

because the source of the categories is the transcen- 
dental ego or self-consciousness, and self-consciousness 
itself is impossible on the basis of purely analytic 
thought. 

The categories are simply the tools with which the 
self-consciousness works in overcoming the external 
world, but if there were no consciousness there could 
be, of course, no methods of its manifestation. How- 
ever this does not still free us from the difficult}'^ ; the 
question, why is self-consciousness impossible if thought 
be purely analytic, is not answered, and is just as per- 
plexing as to say the categories are impossible if 
thought be analytic. Let us therefore see why self- 
consciousness would be impossible if thought were 
purely analytic. We cannot be conscious unless we 
are conscious of something. We have a thought, it 
may be true or false that is of no consequence, the 
question is, how is the thought determined? does it 
determine itself by working in itself or must it have a 
foreign element to work upon or to work through in 
order to determine itself? Kant would evidently say the 
latter, for if it did not need the foreign element there could 
be a judgment formed from the movement of thought per 
se ; and out of that judgment must come knowledge and 
experience, and by the movement of thought in its own 
determination we have arrived at knowledge without a 
perception or even the form of a perception, which is 
contradictory to Kanfs whole philosophic doctrine. 
Such could not be the movement of thought within 



64 

itself without objectifying the transcendental ego and 
making it subject to the limitations of the categories ; 
this would reduce us again to the Cartesian cogito ergo 
sum, which leaves us precisely where we were when 
Kant took us and began to lead us through this laby- 
rinthian process of knowledge. 

Kant was never able to free himself from the common 
conception that the actual was somehow given and 
thought worked itself into this real somewhat. 
J Thought by working on the sensibility gave us both 
perception and conception, the one coming from the 
objective side and the other coming from the subjective 
side ; these two elements must be brought into a unity 
and we must be conscious of the unity or we cannot 
possibly have an experience at all. The transcendental 
self was and is the activity which produces this unity, 
but this transcendental ego is as it were a mere focal 
point between the Ego and the world, or it is rather the 
point of Egoity outside the world looking at the world, 
a mere thought activity. We are conscious of the Ego 
as separated from the world and yet the world is due to 
the synthetic unity of the self. There is no world 
.except through the activity of the Ego and no con- 
sciousness of the Ego except through the synthetic 
relations which the world holds to the Ego. Kant was 
never able to get the Transcendental Ego out of itself 
and get the world into it. It was because of this fact 
that Kant's doctrine of the Transcendental Ego was not 
satisfactory to philosophers who followed him. 



^5 

The fact that Kant treated thought as a necessary 
element in knowledge and yet made it purely analytic 
confuses us from the fact that we cannot conceive of it 
as being purely analytic without the impossibility of 
being able to make the simple judgment I am I, yet 
Kant says that judgment is purely analytic. But to 
Kant this judgment could not be made without in some 
way the manifold, the world of sense, becoming a sort 
of background from which the I was distinguished but 
which of itself did not enter into the judgment. On 
the other hand, Kant treated the external world as a 
thing-in-itself which as such was entirely foreign to the 
I yet must be thought, but until brought into a unity 
with the I could not be known. This was the dualism 
which Kant never overcame ; the external world must 
be thought as something external to the I, and the I 
must be thought as something independent of the world ; 
yet we could not know that either existed without the 
other, neither could we have an experience without the 
union of the two and at the same time have a con- 
sciousness of the union. By the function assigned to 
the Transcendental Ego Kant succeeded in doing away 
with the dualism of the elements of perception and con- 
ception arising respectively from the manifold and from 
thought, but he never succeeded in doing away with 
the dualism of the elements of perception and concep- 
tion in knowledge. While Kant's philosophy was a 
great advance on anything that had preceded him, in 
the solution of the problems of knowledge, he did not 



66 



reach the ultimate principle. He left a great question 
unsolved — the relation of the Transcendental Ego to the 
Empirical Ego. The Transcendental Ego was to Kant 
the ultimate principle and he attempted to show its 
relation to experience ; it existed only as it connected 
elements of experience, and where it connected them it 
was a mere thought point, or activity, a kind of focus 
and can be nothing more so far as our knowledge of it 
is concerned. It can never reflect the self to us ; it can 
never give the self back to us in any knowable way. 
From its very nature it hampers itself, reduces itself to 
a mere point which is necessary and thinkable, yet 
which cannot be reflected or given back to us and which 
must forever remain unknowable. It is because of this 
view that Kant's highest category must be that of 
reciprocity. 



IV. 



POINTS OF RESEMBLANCE AND DIFFERENCE COMPARED 
AND CONTRASTED. 

Berkeley has not received the credit due him for his 
philosophic thought, simply because of his dogmatical 
statements. He did not systematize the great principles 
he postulated. Mere analytic knowledge was impossible 
with Berkeley but he did not stop to prove that such 
was the case. His acceptation of the Will practically 
makes such a proof unnecessary. He regards the proof 
of the existence of God as set forth in his Divine Visual 
Language, as conclusive, and this supplemented by the 
Scriptural revelation seemed to Berkeley to be sufficient 
even to convince a sceptic that God existed and in Him 
were all the attributes or factors of a perfect intelli- 
gence. Even accepting that God is all that Berkeley 
claims Him to be, Berkeley still fails from a philosophic 
standpoint in so far as he does not systematize the 
process of knowledge even as given to us through the 
postulated principles. He would have approached a 
system of knowledge had he succeeded in developing 
the Will as he anticipated doing, but even then he was 
assuming certain Divine principles which were dog- 
matic rather than philosophic. 

The chief point of failure in Berkeley's system was 



68 



that he started with one thing-in-itself, subjective spirit, 
and made the activity of God's Will the efficient cause 
of the same, and not only the mere cause but the active 
principle through which this subjective thing-in-itself 
had activity and through which it was possible to obtain 
a knowledge of the universe. He made the same active 
principle of Divine Will the efficient cause of the real 
objective world but at the same time denied that there 
was an objective thing-in-itself. Now how the same 
efficient cause or Divine activity produced a subjective 
thing-in-itself, and gave it activity, and produced an 
objective reality which was not a thing-in-itself, and 
had no activity was what Berkeley did not express or 
attempt to explain. He took it for granted, with his 
conception of the Will, that such an explanation was 
not necessary. The acceptation of God's existence was 
all that was necessary to him and for this very reason 
he has been classed, and justly too, with the dogmatists. 

Berkeley meant to show that the Will was the essence 
of spirit substance and also of material substance ; but 
because he never reached a clear vision of the process 
by which he could make Will play this specific part in 
the unity of the universe, and the unity of the perfect 
intelligence of the same, he never gave to the world his 
deepest and most critical philosophic work, viz., A 
Treatise on the Human Will. 

The reason of Berkeley's failure may be given in a 
single sentence. He failed to grasp the idea and to 
apply the Dialectic in philosophical reasoning. His 



69 

Philosophy was hidden behind his Theology, and he i 
feared to cut himself loose from his Theology and to 
enter into a process of purely philosophical reasoning 
lest the result would be in discord with the revealed 
idea of God ; he chose therefore to hold tenaciously to 
the notion he had of God from the Biblical revelation 
and by process of formal rather than real Logic to make 
men accept his premises. He therefore postulated his 
premises rather than logically made them, and by so 
doing laid himself liable to the charge of dogmatism. 

Kant's advance on Berkeley was in bringing Philoso- 
phy out from behind the veil of Theology, and in 
applying the Dialectic to it. Kant sought the truth for 
its own sake whether or not it came in harmony with 
preconceived theological notions. If one was true and 
the other was not the process of real Logic and the 
Dialectic must drive the false one to the wall. Whether 
Kant's philosophy is true or not, it is p/iz'loso^/iy. He 
made his premises and put the dialectic into his system. 
Philosophy is a system and that is what Kant had that 
Berkeley did not have, and just so far as that system 
went Kant as a philosopher was in advance of Berkeley. 
Kant's failure to grasp the full movement of thought lay 
in the fact that he took thought to be purely analytic, 
and yet deals with it as though he had all the while 
presupposed a synthesis. This brings him before his 
critics as teaching a contradictory philosophy which he 
could not harmonize. It led him into an artificial de- 
duction ot the categories which made them rigid and 



70 

tied them up in their application to only one-half the 
truth, beyond which Kant could only think and not 
know. Kant's movement through the dialectic has 
practically freed him from the charge of dogmatism- 
Yet ultimately, on the basis of thought being purely 
analytic, he must have fallen into precisely the same 
dogmatism that constantly hampered Berkeley. Kant 
was making his way between two philosophical poles, 
Dogmatism on the one hand and Scepticism on the 
other, and freed himself from stranding on either by his 
process of synthesizing perception and conception. He 
could never have been wholly free from the former had 
he not taught better than he knew by presupposing a 
synthesis while he treated thought as analytic. Another 
fundamental error lies in the fact that Kant made his 
method regressive and not progressive. This logical 
error can be best expressed by quoting from Caird. 
"Now, I have attempted to show that in all this there is 
only one logical error, to wit, the confusion of the 
regressive process of thought, by which the unity of self 
is found to underlie the categories and the forms of 
sense, with a process of mere abstraction. This error 
necessarily carries with it the conception of the unity of 
self-consciousness as purely analytic, and as, therefore, 
standing in irreconcilable opposition to the unity of the 
consciousness of objects as purely synthetic, i. e., as 
externally synthetic of the matter given under the forms 
of sense. From this, again, follows the impossibility of 
reaching a Icnowledge which is adequate to the Ideas of 



71 

reason, and the equal impossibility of conceiving the 
moral law as realized in the phenomenal world. Hence, 
also, the moral law itself shrinks into the conception of 
law in general, and this into the tautology of self-con- 
sistency, i. e., of consistency with that which has in 
itself no determination. And if a partial escape is 
found from this emptiness of abstraction by "typifying" 
the moral law as a law of nature ; yet the conception of 
the law of freedom as if it were a law of necessity seems 
to be too hopelessly self-contradictory to bring with it 
any real solution of the dificulty." ^ 

Our investigation so far has been to find the active 
principle in knowledge as. held by each of the philoso- 
phers under consideration and to some extent to define 
its application in the philosophical works which they 
have left to posterity. We have also briefly pointed out 
some of the fundamental defects in each system. It 
now remains for us to call attention to some of the points 
of similarity and dissimilarity. Let us first then take up 
the points of likeness. 

Both inquired into the Principles of Human Knowl- 
edge, and both inquiries included the same factors of 
knowledge, viz.. Self, the World and God. Self and 
the World constituted the two elements or factors of 
special inquiry in both cases. As neither of the phil- 
osophers regarded Self and the World as one and the 
same thing, a dualism arose in each system. The 
nature of the dualism constituting one of the differences 

» Critical Philosophy of Kant. By Caird. Vol. II. P. 640, 



72 

may be omitted for the present. This dualism consti- 
tuted a fundamental defect in the process of knowledge, 
hence, both attempted to free themselves from this 
dualism and to develop a process of knowledge which 
would ultimately give us a complete unity. The nature 
of the elements of synthesis constitutes the foregoing 
portion of this discussion. That element is in Berkeley's 
system the Will, and in Kant's the Transcendental Ego 
or Synthetic Unity of Apperception. To arrive at this 
unity both began with experience and both made a 
synthetic activity necessary to experience. That both 
began with experience is clear for Berkeley says, "If it 
were not for sense the mind could have no knowledge, 
no thought at all. All of introversion, meditation, con- 
templation, and spiritual acts — as if these could be 
exerted before we had ideas from without by the senses 
— are manifestly absurd."^ Kant's whole philosophy 
is based on the fact that knowledge begins with experi- 
ence, and that the manifold of sense is an indispensable 
factor. 

Berkeley holds that all knowledge is about ideas but 
ideas are impossible without experience. Kant holds 
that all knowledge begins with experience. Berkeley 
says, "all ideas are from without or from within." 
Kant holds that we have external sense and internal 
sense, and these express themselves in the form of 
space and time. Berkeley holds that if these ideas 
are from without, they are sensations, — Kant, that they 

1 Commonplace Book, P. 434. 



73 

are perceptions, the manifold. Berkeley says, if they 
are from within they are operations of the mind, 
thoughts — Kant that they are conceptions, thoughts. 
Berkeley, all our ideas (experiences) are either sen- 
sations or thoughts. Kant, all our experiences are 
sensations and thoughts.^ Berkeley, the bare pas- 
sive recognition or having of ideas is called perception. 
Kant, the vague whole given by the manifold unana- 
lyzed is perception, Berkeley, whatever has in it an 
idea (experience) though it be never so passive, 
though it exert no manner of act about it, yet it must 
perceive (think). Kant, whatever has experience 
must have perception (sensations) and thought com- 
bined. Berkeley, two things cannot be said to be alike 
or unlike till they have been compared. Comparing is 
the viewing two ideas together and marking in what they 
agree and what they disagree. The mind can compare 
nothing but its own ideas. Kant, the world of experi- 
ence can only be known by classification and by placing 
each object under the category in which it belongs.'' 

In the above classification the language of Berkeley 
has been closely followed and it shows a decided paral- 
lelism in the fundamental principles with which both 
systems began. 

•This comparison must be taken with some license both on the part of Berkeley 
and of Kant. It we take Berkeley's phraseology "sensations or thoughts" as isolated 
from his principle of synthesis it indicates sources of knowledge and is in perfect 
harmony with Locke's doctrine of knowledge. To get the full force of the state- 
ment it must be looked at in the light of the present discussion. On the other 
hand, Kant must be regarded as using "sensations and thoughts" as /actors in 
experience. 

" For above statements of Berkeley see Commonplace Book, PP. 49S-499. 



74 

It is equally true that both made a synthetic activity 
necessary to experience. With Berkeley, experience 
is impossible without in some way the whole phenome- 
non is connected ; without a connection there would be 
neither world nor experience. The true source is 
within the veil. It is in the super-sensible or trans- 
cendent, not among phenomena or in the world of 
phenomenal experience. Can we follow it within the 
veil? That depends upon the possibility of our having 
either a sort of knowledge that is unphenomenal, or 
else a faith that transcends both the data of the senses 
and faith in merely physical law.'^ 

This synthetic activity which makes the necessary 
connection and which lies behind the veil is the Will. 
It cannot be known, but, on account of a faith which 
transcends the data of sense, must be thought. The 
Will cannot be known, and yet it leads us on in our 
process of knowledge until we are as sure of it as we 
are of our own existence, we have to think it; if we 
say we know, the knowledge must be of a kind unphe- 
nomenal, it is rather a transcendent faith. With Kant, 
experience is impossible without the synthesis of per- 
ception and conception and the consciousness of the 
synthetic act ; this involves the law of necessary con- 
nection. This synthetic activity is the Transcendental 
Unity of Apperception. By attempting to know this 
synthetic activity we are led from the phenomenal to 
the noumenal world, in which we are unable to apply 

^Berkeley, Blackwood's Classics, PP. 194-195. 



75 

theoretical reason, 'because theoretical reason is bound 
down to the world of sense ; but we can approach it by 
practical reason which is not limited by sense. We 
cannot know it, however, but for practical reason it is 
enough that we think it, and determine ourselves 
according to the Ideas of it. In so far as we are forced 
to think it and it is forced upon us by a law which is 
one with the consciousness of ourselves, we may say 
we are as sure of its truth as of our own existence.'^ It 
is in this point with Kant as it is with Berkeley, we 
walk by faith and not by sight ; this is one of the most 
important and interesting similarities existing in the 
two systems. The name by which the activity is desig- 
nated is of but little importance in this discussion, the 
real truth of the matter is what we are seeking. The 
difference between Berkeley and Kant in the use of this 
active principle is just the difference between induction 
and deduction and nothing more, i. e., there is no strict 
line of demarkation. Induction is the process of 
thought when we have in mind the getting of a hypoth- 
esis, and this was Berkeley's position. "What he 
attempted was done, he modestly says, with a view to 
giving hints to thinking men who have leisure and 
curiosity to go to the bottom of things, and pursue them 
in their own minds. "^ That is, Berkeley concerned 
himself with the production of hypotheses rather than 
the defining of them. Deduction is defining or devel- 

1 Critical Philosophy of Kant. By Caird. Vol. II, P. 634. 
^Introduction to Selections, P. XXXIII. 



76 

oping a hypothesis, and represents Kant's position in 
the movement of thought; he explained hypotheses, 
defined them and in his definitions transformed them.. 
The true difference in induction and deduction is then 
simply different cross-sections in the same movement of 
thought, or they are the same thing in different stages 
of development. Berkeley and Kant are related in the 
same way, Berkeley representing the inductive cross- 
section and Kant the deductive cross-section of the 
movement of thought. 

In summing up the points of similarity we may say, 
the inquiries of both involve the relation of Self and the 
World ; both began with experience ; both had a dual- 
ism ; both sought a unity ; both saw the necessity of a 
synthetic activity ; both made this activity necessary to 
experience ; both made the active principle thinkable 
but unknowable ; both led us through Reason by means 
of a transcendent faith, into an undoubted assurance of 
Immortality, Freedom and God. 

We are not to assume from what has been said, that 
there are no differences between Berkeley and Kant as 
to their philosophical systems. The differences in 
many respects are more fundamental than their like- 
nesses, as will readily be suggested to the mind of the 
student of Berkeley and Kant. I believe it necessary 
only to call attention to these differences, when they 
become sufficiently apparent. The first difference, 
which is a fundamental one, is found in the bases upon 
which these two systems of philosophy are founded. 



11 

Berkeley makes metaphysics the key-stone in the arch 
of his system and makes all things in the phenomenal 
world conform to that theory. Kant makes science the 
basis of his system and reasons from the possibility of 
science to the possibility of metaphysics. In other 
words Berkeley practically says, metaphysics given, 
how is the world of science possible? Kant, the world 
of science given, how is metaphysics possible? Berke- 
ley was more sure of the existence of God than he was 
of the external world. Kant more sure of the existence 
of the external world than he was of the existence of 
God. 

Another difference is in Kant's use of the dialectic of 
thought. This is of great importance in a system of 
philosophy. The dialectic falls back on the pure unity 
of thought itself pre-supposed in conceptual synthesis. 
It suggests noumena and not objects of experience, and 
gives rise to questions which experience cannot settle. 
It is the process by which we are enabled to go beyond 
the sphere of the understanding and the phenomenal 
world into the sphere of reason and the noumenal 
world. The movement of thought by which such a 
transition can be made is almost indispensable in the 
formation and carrying out of a system of philosophy. 
This movement Berkeley never succeeded in embodying 
in his philosophy, but Kant did. This marks one of 
the wide differences. Berkeley never succeeded in 
getting outside of his subject, but from within he looked 
at it from this way and from that, and each time got 



78 

some practically new view of the question at issue ; 
hence, his system is largely defective in method. Kant 
got outside of his subject and looked at it as a whole, 
and each variation in the movement shows us the same 
theme looked at from a new standpoint, hence, Kant's 
system is methodic. 

They differed in the dualism that arose out of their 
treatment of the Self and the external World. Kant's 
dualism was a dualism of perception and conception, a 
dualism between self-consciousness and the manifold. 
Berkeley's dualism, as has already been explained, 
was practically a dualism of concepts. Kant's dualism 
arose from getting outside of his subject and recogniz- 
ing two elements separate and distinct, without the 
union of which there could be no knowledge. Berke- 
ley's dualism arose by staying inside of his subject and 
recognizing two diametrically opposite conditions, spir- 
itual and so-called material, which, in order to have 
knowledge, must be harmonized. Kant's unity is the 
Transcendental Ego. Berkeley's unity is the Will. 

Finally, they differed in what constituted identity. 
Berkeley's identity is in reality only a superficial iden- 
tity, there is no essential reality in the relation of 
things ; relations are ideal, and that which constitutes 
identity is without the thing and independent of it. The 
identity of Berkeley is like a thread running through 
things which holds them together yet leaves them inde- 
pendent. So far as the relation of these things, one to 
another, is concerned it is ideal. Kant's identity is 
very different, it is an underlying identity, an identity 



79 

of differences in which the relation is real instead of 
ideal. A quotation from Caird wil\ serve better than 
my own language to show Kant's position with respect 
to identity. "Since, however, the relations of the 
substances are represented by Kant as real and not 
merely ideal, and since the substances can manifest 
their nature only in those relations, the opposition of 
their individuality to their relativity is on the point of 
disappearing, and with it of course must disappear the 
externality of the principle that unites them. For, if 
the difference of the substances be merely a relative 
difference, i. e., a difference of elements which are 
nothing apart from their relations to each other, the 
binding principle cannot be regarded as an external 
link of connection, but must be taken simply as the 
unity which underlies the differences of the substances, 
and which manifests itself in their action and reaction 
upon each other. "^ 

To sum up — their chief differences lie in the bases 
on which the systems are founded, in the standpoints 
from which they looked at the subject under considera- 
tion, in their dualism, and in what constitutes identity. 

In conclusion, let us rise above the mere method and 
look at the truth as each of those great philosophers 
sought to find it. We see Berkeley approach it from 
the side of metaphysics and write Empirically Ideal and 
Transcendentally Real. From the side of science Kant 
approaches and writes Empirically Real and Transcen- 
dentally Ideal. 

1 Critical Philosophy of Kant. By Caird. Vol. I, P. 113. 



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THE 



PRINCIPLE OF SYNTHETIC UNITY 
IN BERKELEY AND KANT. 



By 
SAMUEL 2*1. DICK, A.M., Ph.D. 



LOWELL, MASS. : 
Morning Mail Company Pkint. 

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NDERY 
1903 



